2024-25 Concerts

In celebration of the School of Music’s Centennial, this year’s four Freeman Sunday concerts each feature specific areas of the School of Music. Each concert includes the premiere of a new work by an accomplished USC composition alum.

The first concert on September 29, 2024 features performances by voice and strings faculty. Voice faculty Dominic Armstrong and Ashley Emerson, accompanied by the USC faculty string quartet, will perform the world premiere of Rachel Whelan’s maybe there will be Music, which sets poetry by Paul L. Thomas. The program also features Duo Cortona (mezzo Rachel Calloway and violinist Ari Streisfeld); tenor Johnnie Felder, baritone Jacob Will, violinist Bill Terwilliger, and pianist Lynn Kompass in Ralph Vaughn-Williams’ The Last Invocation; and soprano Serena LaRoche joined by a student / alumni choir of eight cellists led by Claire Bryant, in Heitor Villa Lobos’s gorgeous Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5, "Aria (Cantilena)." Click to purchase tickets.

The second Freeman concert is on October 27, 2024 and f The year’s second Freeman Sundays @3 concert features the School of Music's woodwind and brass areas in a performance of W.A. Mozart’s 50-minute masterwork for 13 winds, Serenade No. 10 ("Gran Partita”); and the world premiere of composition alumnus David Clay Mettens’ Caroliniana Harmonie (“Nachtmusik”), composed for the school's centennial celebrations. Both works will be conducted by Cormac Cannon.

Mettens, currently Interim Director of Composition at Roosevelt University and a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, will be in attendance at the concert and working with USC students and faculty throughout the week.  Click to purchase tickets.

The first Spring semester concert is February 2, 2025 and features the percussion, piano, and guitar areas. It includes performances by the award-winning USC Percussion Ensemble — Garth Neustadter’s Seaborne, for video, four percussionists, and piano — guitar professor Mak Grgic (joined by pianist Omar Roy and mezzo soprano Rachel Calloway) — and pianist Nick Susi, in a piano sonata by Ecuadorian composer Luis Humberto Salgado. The percussion ensemble will also give the world premiere of Charleston-based alumnus JaRon Brown’s “to the boy from Venus, with love,” written for the School of Music’s Centennial Celebrations.  Click to purchase tickets.

 The season’s fourth and final concert, April 6, 2025, includes performers from all areas of the music school, with special guest composer Andy Akiho. Akiho is a multiple Grammy-award and Pulitzer finalist, and will join us for the East Coast premiere and second performance ever of a new work for winds, strings, percussion, and piano. Also on the program: Prokofiev’s quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass; and a set by the USC jazz faculty, including Colleen Clark, Lauren Meccia, and Matt White. This special concert will be hosted by USC grad Bradley Fuller, the host of SC Public Radio’s Sonatas and Soundscapes. Click to purchase tickets.

$15 for adults, $10 for seniors, and free for USC School of Music students, faculty and staff. Tickets are available at the Koger Center for the Arts Box Office (803-251-2222) and at the door.
 
Concerts are not live-streamed, but video recordings can be made available upon request to patrons who support the School of Music.
 

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Learn more about this exciting season here.