Weekend concerts feature Taliesin Trio and organist Robert Horton

This weekend, the Department of Music presents two concerts, free and open to the public, by artists with Cornell and Ithaca College connections.

·Saturday, Oct. 5, at 8 p.m. the Taliesin Trio returns to Barnes Hall after a year's absence to present a concert of four works. Pianist Xak Bjerken, violinist Ellen Jewett and cellist Elizabeth Simkin have selected compositions by Josef Haydn, Stephen Hartke, Bright Sheng and Robert Schumann to share with their audience.

Bjerken, Jewett, and Simkin open the concert with Haydn's Trio in E Minor, Hob. XV:12. Guest clarinetist Richard Faria then takes Simkin's place to perform Stephen Hartke's The Horse with the Lavender Eye. Written in 1997, the piece is composed of four episodes for violin, clarinet and piano. After intermission, Taliesin Trio completes the program with Bright Sheng's Four Movements for Piano Trio and Schumann's Trio in F Major, op. 80.

Bjerken is assistant professor of piano at Cornell and is a member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet. A member of the Ithaca College School of Music faculty for five years, Jewett is an adjunct lecturer at Binghamton University. Simkin moved to the Ithaca area in the fall of 1994 to join the Ithaca College School of Music faculty, where she currently performs with the Ariadne String Quartet.

·Sunday, Oct. 6, Cornell alumnus Robert Horton, first-prize winner at two national organ competitions, will perform a program of French and American 20th-century works as part of the 2002-03 organ series, "Americans in Paris," partially funded by the Cornell Council for the Arts.

The Sage Chapel concert, which is at 8 p.m., will include works by American composers Leo Sowerby and William Bolcom and French composers Maurice Duruflé, Thierry Escaich and Olivier Messiaen.

Horton began studying organ at Cornell in Sage Chapel with William Cowdery and Annette Richards. After spending a year in Kyoto, Japan, and completing a B.A. in East Asian studies, he went on to earn a master's degree in organ at Northwestern University. He is currently in the home stretch of a doctorate in organ at the University of Kansas.