Performer Profiles - Fall 2014 Season |
Coming September 3, 2014: |
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Coming September 10, 2014: |
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Coming September 17, 2014: |
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Coming September 24, 2014: |
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Coming October 1, 2014:Jon West, Heldentenor Music |
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Coming October 8, 2014:Todd Fleming Davis Poet |
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Coming October 22, 2014The Hamilton College Saxophone Ensemble Music |
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Coming October 29, 2014: |
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Coming November 12, 2014: |
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Coming November 19, 2014: |
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Coming December 3, 2014: |
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Laurie Dapice at the age of 14 began voice training with internationally renowned Tenor Pasquale Caputo. She relocated to New York City in 1998 to follow her dreams and began her journey and education at Mannas College of Music and The New School University of Jazz and Contemporary Music, attaining a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in Performance & Music in 2006. In 2008 she was chosen as one on NYC's top 12 Jazz Singers to compete in a legendary competition, founded by Dr Billy Taylor's JazzMobile, and made it to the top final four. A month later she headed to Japan for a month long performance in The Zenith Sky Lounge at The Marriott Hotels 56th floor Penthouse as the headlining act six nights a week. Returning to Manhattan, she accomplished a life long dream, recording & completing her first Album, Parting the Veil, at Bennett Studios in Englewood N.J. and which was released in 2013. 
Rick Montalbano, pianist, organist, composer, arranger, and educator started his career in the early 1960’s and has performed with a long list of jazz greats. Rick served as pianist/conductor for singer Lou Rawls in the early 70s. He currently plays solo piano at The Savoy in Rome, NY, performs with and contracts bands for the Showroom at the Turning Stone Casino and is much demand as an accompanist. In addition to operating the Music Factory recording studio, Rick teaches jazz piano at Colgate University, Hamilton College and Syracuse University and is the assistant director of the Central New York Jazz Orchestra. 
Poet
Entirely self-taught, and the master of many materials, John Lyon Paul works in the solitude of a large studio he built at the end of a dead-end road in the hills above Ithaca. His work has been exhibited at the Arnot Art Museum, and in many juried and invitational gallery shows and is in private collections throughout the United States. In 2010 John was chosen as the Featured Artist of the “Conflict and Visual Culture Project” at the Solomon Asch Center, and in 2011 he was selected for the NYFA MARK professional artist program. 
Alexi Zentner is the author of the novels The Lobster Kings and Touch. Touch has been published or is forthcoming in a dozen countries and ten languages, and The Lobster Kings will be published in at least six counties and five languages. Touch was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award, The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the 2011 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Alexi’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, The Walrus, and many other publications. He is the winner of both the O. Henry Prize (jury favorite) and the NarrativePrize, and has been shortlisted for the Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. Alexi is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University and a faculty member in the Sierra Nevada College low residency MFA program. 
Jon West, Heldentenor, was born in Dayton, Ohio, and studied at the Manhattan School of Music and at the Juilliard Opera Theatre. He sang rôles such as Tannhäuser, Siegfried in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Tristan, the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Otello at the Munich Prinzregenten Theater, the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Vienna State Opera, the Rome Teatro dell’Opera, the Madrid Teatro Real, Covent Garden and the Chicago Lyric Opera, as well as at the New York Met, and appeared at the Salzburg Festival and the Festival de Musica de Canarias, in which he sang the male title-rôle in Samson et Dalila, in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, Canio in Pagliacci, and Florestan at La Fenice. He has worked with conductors including Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle and Seiji Ozawa. He has also been heard in Stuttgart as Canio and as Tristan. 
Sarah Crocker, singers Helen Boatwright, Peter Vandergraaf, and Sanford Sylvan, as well as multitudes of fine musicians who live and perform throughout upstate New York. Locally he performs with the Society for New Music, where he has been involved in premiere of many new works, and also appears regularly on programs of Civic Morning musicals, the Skaneateles Festival, A Little Summer Music, The Oasis Center of Syracuse, Hamilton Copllege, and Utica College. He has performed orchestral keyboard with virtually all the orchestras in the area, most notably with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, and is a founding member of both the Jewell Piano Trio and the Southwick Trio. Recorded performances with the Society for New Music on Innova Records and with soprano Janet Brown on Russetbrush Records have met with considerable acclaim.
Todd Davis is the author of four books of poems, most recently In the Kingdom of the Ditch and The Least of These, both published by Michigan State University Press. He also edited Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball (Michigan State University Press, 2012) and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (SUNY Press, 2010). The winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, Davis’s poems have appeared in such noted magazines and journals as American Poetry Review, The North American Review, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and River Styx. He teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Penn State University’s Altoona College. 
The Music Department at Hamilton College supports an active Chamber Ensemble program coordinated by Professor Heather Buchman. The saxophone Ensemble was established in 2006 and over the years has varied in size from a quartet to a nine member group. The ensemble prides itself on performing a wide variety of music, from Bach to the Beatles, and most of the selections have been arranged specifically for the group. In addition to appearances on campus, the Saxophone Ensemble has shared its music on the Clinton Village Green and at Utica’s Tramontane open mic night. A performance schedule of Hamilton ensembles may be viewed at 
Monk Rowe is the director of the Hamilton College Saxophone Ensemble. 
The Finger Lakes Guitar Quartet presents exciting, eclectic programming spanning five centuries, including original arrangements, as well as works written for, and premiered by the FLGQ. The members of the Finger Lakes Guitar Quartet are four accomplished guitar soloists, Joel Brown, Brett Grigsby, Sten Isachsen, and Paul Quigley. 
Jennifer Pashley is the author of two collections of stories, States (Lewis-Clark, 2007) and The Conjurer (Standing Stone, 2013). Her fiction, poems and essays have appeared widely in journals like Mississippi Review, PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, Interim, and Salt Hill, and have been awarded the Red Hen Prize for fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT fiction. Her first novel, The Scamp, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2015.
David Kolb is a graduate of Hamilton College with double concentrations in music and mathematics, has taught math at Mohawk Valley Community College, and directed choirs for the Utica Maennerchor and Stone Presbyterian Church in Clinton. He is currently the Director of Music for First Presbyterian Church in Rome. David is also a frequent performer in local theatrical productions and sings with the local music ensemble Above Standards, David was a featured soloist in the production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors in Syracuse last December, and in the Masterworks Chorale’s performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams Fanstasy on Christmas Carols performed at Hamilton College. David was one of the featured soloists in the December 3, 2013 Hamilton College and Community Masterworks Chorale’s performance of Bach’s Magnificat. After several years’ hiatus, the Utica College Concert Choir was reconstituted in 2010 with David as its director. 
Alane Varga, piano accompanist, began her career at Utica College in fall 1983, as a counselor in the Academic Support Services. She was cofounder with Dr. Della Ferguson of the Womyn’s Resource Center at Utica College. In 2011, Alane was appointed Dean of Students at Utica College. She has been musically active as an accompanist in a range of venues, including community coffeehouses, musicals performed at Utica College reflecting her love of Broadway, and in the Professor Harry F. and Mary Ruth Jackson Utica College Lunch Hour Series.
School of Arts and Sciences
School of Arts and Sciences
artsandsciences@
utica.edu
utica.edu
(315) 792-3028