The 2011 Festival of the Arts will run from April 13-16. Leading off the festival will be our top student band, the Symphonic Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Dr. Robert Halseth. The band will be performing at 7:30pm on Wednesday, April 13 in the Music Recital Hall.

One of our faculty members, lyric coloratura soprano Dr. Robin Fisher, will be performing at 4:00pm on Thursday, April 14 in Capistrano Hall 151. The program will feature music and stories from the salon of Jane Austen, with John Cozza, pianist and Dr. David Bell, narrator. Dr. Fisher has performed to critical acclaim in such cities as Paris, Vienna, Prague, Hamburg, Chicago and Dallas. Press reviews remark on her “amazingly precise coloratura, melting diminuendi, splendid high notes and delightful musicality” (Opernwelt) and her “mature timbre and total self-assurance…. an extremely exciting singer-actress” (Westdeutsche Zeitung). Ms. Fisher won both the prestigious Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship and a Rotary Foundation Award to pursue studies in Europe, and received the coveted Artist's Diploma cum laude from the University of Vienna. She holds a D.M.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sacramento State's award-winning Jazz Ensembles will be performing on Thursday, April 14 at 8:00pm in the Music Recital Hall, with guest saxophonist Donny McCaslin. Under the direction of Steve Roach, the Sacramento State jazz ensembles perform hard hitting big band music from a wide variety of styles - from the cutting edge contemporary styles of writers such as Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, Vince Mendoza, and Bob Mintzer to the classics of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus. Donny McCaslin was a 2004 Grammy nominee for "Best Instrumental Jazz Solo" while playing with the Maria Schneider orchestra. He started playing tenor saxophone at 12, and quickly progressed, touring Europe and participating in the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival’s California All-Star band while in high school. After attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he joined Berklee professor Gary Burton’s quintet, with whom he toured for four years. McCaslin moved to New York, in 1991, working with bassist Eddie Gomez and then joining the group Steps Ahead. He has since performed on recordings by Danilo Perez, Luciana Souza, and performances with Tom Harrell, Brian Blade, John Pattitucci, The Mingus Band, and Pat Metheny.

The New Millennium Series will present the Pacific Guitar Ensemble on Friday, April 15 at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall. The Pacific Guitar Ensemble began in 2010 when two friends, classical guitarist David Tanenbaum and steel-string guitarist Peppino D'Agostino, decided they wanted to form a larger guitar ensemble that could perform a wide variety of repertoire. After they gathered together members of the guitar faculty from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with some of its most exceptional alumni, and combined nylon strings with steel, electric basses with 17th century theorbos, a new eclectic group of pluckers was born. While the Pacific Guitar Ensemble's repertoire features original music written by composers like Brazilian guitar legend Sergio Assad, noted minimalist Belinda Reynolds, and group's own brilliant steel-string stylist Peppino D'Agostino, it also includes fresh arrangements of great composers from Bach to Brahms, Dowland to Rossini.

The Festival wraps up on Saturday, April 16 with a Piano Series recital featuring guest artist Adam Neiman at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall. Neiman has performed as soloist with the symphony orchestras of Belgrade, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Minnesota, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Umbria, and Utah, as well as with the New York Chamber Symphony and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C. His European recital tours have brought him throughout Italy, France, Germany, and Japan, where he made an eight-city tour culminating in his debut at Tokyo's Suntory Hall. Born in 1978, Neiman has captured the attention of audiences and critics alike since his concerto debut at 11 in Los Angeles' Royce Hall. Two-time winner of Juilliard's Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, Neiman was honored with the Rubinstein Award upon his graduation in 1999, the same year in which he received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Neiman's principal teachers have included Trula Whelan, Hans Boepple, and Herbert Stessin.