The 2022 Gateways Music Festival in association with Eastman School of Music, which features professional classical musicians of African descent, from throughout the United States and abroad, will open in Rochester April 18.
Musical performances, a film and related lecture and a Gateways Orchestra concert will highlight the first three days .
The festival will then shift to New York City for similar events concluding with the orchestra’s performance in Carnegie Hall on April 24.
A program featuring old classics and new works performed by five pianists will kick off the Rochester events at 7:30 p.m., Monday, April 18 in Hatch Recital Hall, Eastman School of Music, 433 E. Main Street. It is a ticketed event.
Blackcomposer Florence Price will be the focus of a film screening and lectureTuesday, April 19 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Hatch Hall.
Following the showing of the film, “The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” Dr. Cory Hunter, the festival’s Paul J. Burgett Lecture speaker, will give an interactive presentation entitled “Black Idioms in the Music of Florence B. Price.” Hunter is assistant professor of music at the University of Rochester and assistant professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music.The Price program is free of charge but registration for tickets is required.
The Rochester section of the 2022 Gateways Music Festival will conclude at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 20 with a concert by the 100-member Gateways Orchestra, Anthony Parnther , conductor, in Kodak Hall at the Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs St. It is a ticketed event.
The concert will mark Parnther’s debut as Gateways’ new conductor. He succeeds Michael Morgan, long-time Gateways conductor and music director, who died last August following complications from a kidney transplant.
The orchestra concert selections will be “Sinfonia No.” by George Walker, the first black winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music; “Symphony No. 3 in C Minor” by Florence Price; “Fantasia on ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James V. Cockerham, a black composer, and “Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Opus 56,” by Johannes Brahms.
For tickets and more information, visit the Gateways website at: www.gatewaysmusicfestival.