DePauw Chamber Orchestra gives bon voyage concert before touring England

The DePauw Chamber Orchestra will begin its five-concert tour to England with a performance at the Green Center, which features works by American and English composers.

Performances by the DePauw University School of Music resume this week with an offering by the DePauw Chamber Symphony on Wednesday, Jan. 9 at 7:30 p.m. -- the eve of the ensemble's Jan. 10--18 Winter Term tour to England.

Orcenith Smith, founder and conductor of the Chamber Symphony since 1974, will lead a series of five concerts that begin Wednesday night at the Green Center for the Performing Arts, then fly Thursday morning with the ensemble to England for two concerts in London, and one each in Oxford and Bath, with stops at Stonehenge and Stratford-upon-Avon along the way.

Mark McCoy, dean of the School of Music, said the 35-member DePauw Chamber Symphony is a select nucleus of musicians, chosen from the larger all-undergraduate DePauw Orchestra.

Past orchestras have traveled extensively, performing more than 100 concerts at 80 different concert sites in the United States and Canada, including Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Since the early 1980s, the ensemble has also begun to tour abroad, including concerts in Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain, France, Japan and Austria, where the tour was funded by the Austrian government.

School of Music faculty member Nicole Brockmann, who is featured on tour as the viola soloist in Gustav Holst's "Lyric Movement," has also been helping prepare students for the trip with extracurricular, humor-filled lectures in English history, music and culture.

The concert will aptly open with American composer Leonard Bernstein's overture to "Cand-ide," followed by English composer Holst's "Lyric Movement." Also included are excerpts from the American ballet "Rodeo" by Aaron Copland, "In the Steppes of Central Asia" by Russian romantic Alexander Borodin, Johann Strauss's festive overture to the operetta "Die Fledermaus" and "Skylife" by David Balakrishnan.

The concerts conclude with British composer Benjamin Britten's orchestral suite "Soirées Musicales."

Tickets to the DePauw Chamber Orchestra concert can be purchased online at www.depauw.edu/music/tickets and at the Green Center box office, beginning an hour prior to the event.

General admission tickets are $3. Admission for children 12 and younger, all students and seniors age 65 and over are admitted free.