Guest artists step into the spotlight for four concerts

Guest artists will be featured in four free Department of Music concerts, beginning Saturday, Feb. 5, and running through the coming week.

The first guests featured this week are Claudia Anderson (flute, alto flute and piccolo) and pianist Diane Birr. They will present an evening of 20th-century music on Saturday, Feb. 5, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Featured works include "Le Merle Noir" by French composer Olivier Messiaen, "Sequenza" for solo flute by Italian composer Luciano Berio and "Eros," written by Roberto Sierra, professor of composition at Cornell. Also performed will be works by Jean Rivier, John Heiss, Edison Denisov, Donald Erb, Ian Clarke and Robert Beaser.

Anderson's brilliance and originality as a solo performer have graced audiences in the United States, Europe and South America for nearly 30 years. She studied at the University of Michigan, the Yale School of Music and with contemporary flute master Severino Gazzelloni.

Birr has collaborated with numerous vocalists and instrumentalists in recitals and master classes throughout the United States and in Australia, Canada, France, Scotland, Austria and Norway. She is frequently featured as a pianist on the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra's Chamber Music Series and in concerts at Ithaca College.

Tenor Thom Baker joins pianist Emily Green to present Franz Schubert's song cycle, "Die Winterreise" ("The Long Winter"), on Sunday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall.

Though his career includes music spanning the medieval to the present, Baker is known as an "early music" specialist. As a professional choral artist and soloist in New York City, he has enjoyed long associations with groups including AmorArtis, Voices of Ascension and New York's Ensemble for Early Music, and he retains membership in the Grammy-nominated a cappella ensemble Pomerium, which performed in the Cornell Concert Series earlier this season.

Green is in her second year of the Ph.D. program in musicology at Cornell, where she specializes in 18th-century French music. She earned her master of music degree in piano performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2003, where she studied with Robert Weirich.

Jan Kobow, tenor, and Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano, will present an evening of German songs titled "Follow the Lieder" Monday, Feb. 7, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Featured will be lieder by C.P.E. Bach, Gluck and Schubert, as well as a selection of songs by lesser known composers.

Kobow was born in Berlin and initially studied organ (Schola Cantorum in Paris) and church music (Hannover) before taking up the study of voice at the Academy of Music in Hamburg with Sabine Kirchner. He performs with conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Frieder Bernius, John Eliot Gardiner, and Gustav Leonhardt and with ensembles such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.

Born in 1979, Bezuidenhout began his studies in Australia at the age of 10. He has worked with teachers including Rebecca Penneys, Paul O'Dette, Malcolm Bilson, Robert Levin and Arthur Haas and completed graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music. At 21, he won the prestigious First Prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition (2001) as well as the Audience Prize, which has been awarded only three times in the history of the competition.

Soprano Judith Kellock, Cornell associate professor of music, has programmed an entire recital around the protest of war, titled "Songs in Response to War and Oppression." With collaborating guest pianist Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta, the duo will present songs by Duparc, Poulenc, Stephen Foster, Charles Ives and Cornell's Roberto Sierra, among others, about the horrors of war and protests against it, as well as prayers for lives lost and for peace. The concert will be presented Tuesday, Feb. 8, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall.

Pianist Rodríguez-Peralta has appeared as a soloist throughout the United States and Peru. As a winner of Artists International Young Musicians Auditions, she was presented in two recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall. Of her New York debut, The New York Times called her "a thoughtful musician" and "a pianist well worth hearing."