Chamber music devotees are no doubt looking forward to this weekend's Dubinsky Memorial Concert. The concert, given annually, is piano professor Luba Edlina-Dubinsky's memorial offering to her late husband, Rostislav Dubinsky, who served as violin professor and chamber-music coordinator in the Jacobs School of Music from 1980 until his death in 1997.\n"Everybody who remembers him knows he was a wonderful musician and a wonderful teacher," Edlina-Dubinsky said.\nThis year, Edlina-Dubinsky will be collaborating with faculty clarinetist James Campbell and the Lafayette String Quartet. This all-female quartet comes to Bloomington from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, where its members have served as artists-in-residence since 1991. According to the ensemble's Web site, they recently celebrated their 20th anniversary, making them the only female string ensemble to have retained all the original members for so long a period of time.\nThe concert will be held at 4 p.m. in Auer Hall and is free to the public.\nThe music school also continues its commitment to academic excellence with the next installment of the Musicology Department Colloquium Series this Friday.\n"The departmental colloquium is a forum in which faculty, graduate students and occasional visitors present their research," said Massimo Ossi, the musicology department's chair. "Its primary goal is to keep the members of the department abreast of new work by their colleagues. It can also serve as an important forum to showcase specific areas of scholarly interest."\nThe spring semester was kicked off last week with a presentation by IU musicologist Dan Melamed, who acts as organizer and host of the series. \n"(The Series) is a central part of the department's academic life," he said. "This is a place where we come together as an academic community."\nThis week's lecture will be given by UCLA professor Todd Decker. According to an abstract provided by Melamed, Decker will be offering his observations concerning the nearly 50 dance solos created by the late Fred Astaire over the course of his 35-year career, addressing in particular Astaire's relationship to and interactions with forms of popular music and his frequent collaborations with black artists in a time of racial segregation.\nThe presentation will begin at 12:30 p.m. Friday in Merrill Hall 267. It is free and open to the public.
In review
For those willing to brave the weather, their efforts were richly rewarded by Marietta Simpson, whose recital Sunday evening in Auer Hall was a fascinating journey through a wide-range of musical territory. Simpson, a renowned vocalist who joined the music school's faculty in 2005, initially responded with caution to the audience's enthusiastic applause.\n"OK now, don't wear yourselves out," she called from the stage.\nBut to say the ovations were well-deserved would be an understatement of the grossest kind. Simpson held her audience breathless through the marathon Schumann song-cycle "Frauenliebe und Leben" and elicited peals of laughter with her treatment of the black spiritual "Git on Board." Ms. Simpson is a fabulous figure who clearly and refreshingly glories in being a mezzo-soprano. \nBefore treating the audience to an encore of Moses Hogan's "Give Me Jesus," Simpson confessed she felt that a faculty appointment to the Jacobs School of Music was much like being in high school and getting an invitation to the "cool party."\nWhat I hope she realizes is just how much she herself contributes to the cool factor that attracted her to IU in the first place.
