At the annual honors recital Feb. 25 at Fort Lewis College, 11 music students will perform works by Mozart and Beethoven, Poulenc and Faure, and others.
“This is my favorite student event of the year,” Marc Reed, chairman of the FLC Music Department, said this week. “We have tremendously talented students, and it is very rare that you get to hear so many in one place in this intimate solo setting.”
The students will perform solo works for voice, piano, clarinet, percussion, flute, saxophone and trumpet. They will be accompanied by faculty members Lisa Campi-Walters, Kathy Olinger and Kristen Chen.
All music majors and minors perform for juries at the end of each semester, Reed said. A music jury usually consists of a panel of five to seven department members. And since last year, the music faculty has selected a smaller number of students to represent the department at an annual honors recital.
“It is one of the department’s most highly attended events,” Reed said, “a favorite of music patrons, alumni and community members.”
The recital is free, and this year’s event is dedicated to community member Walter Dear, who recently enhanced The Jan Roshong/Rochelle Mann Music Education Scholarship by making it an endowed fund. Revenues from the investment will support a number of annual scholarships for students like the ones performing in Sunday’s recital.
Dear is a native of New Jersey who worked as a journalist and publisher of a Kentucky newspaper for over 40 years. In 2000, Dear and his late wife, Martha, moved to Durango. Among his many interests and activities, Dear wrote a column for The Durango Herald, published a book, Paradise with an Edge, and continues to play the piano. He’s currently studying with Katherine Olinger at FLC.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theater Critics Association.
