Oberlin Orchestra Concert
A performance by the Oberlin Orchestra in Finney Chapel with Raphael Jiménez, conductor with Associate Professor of Flute, Alexa Still.
Sat, November 12 2011
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Where: Finney Chapel
Free admission
Program Khachaturian: Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from "Spartacus" Liebermann: Concerto for Flute and Orchestra Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Sheherazade, Op. 35 Alexa Still is known internationally for her many recordings on the Koch International Classics label. She has been described as: “impeccable in technique and taste, seductive in phrasing” (Stephensen Classical CD Guide). “Still plays... so convincingly I cannot separate her from the music” (American Record Guide), “whatever she plays sounds musical in every turn of the phrase” (Gramophone), “a stunning showcase for the astonishing Alexa Still” (Fanfare). A New Zealander, Still’s graduate study was in New York (SUNY Stony Brook) where she also won competitions including the New York Flute Club Young Artist Competition and the East and West Artists Competition. Still then won principal flute of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the age of 23. While home, she received a Churchill Fellowship and a Fulbright award, used for further study in the US. In 1998, she left the NZSO to become associate professor of flute at University of Colorado at Boulder in 1998. She then moved to Sydney in 2006, where she became professor of flute and director of performance research at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In June of 2011, Still was appointed associate professor of flute at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Still maintains a busy concert schedule, having presented recitals, concertos, and master classes in England, Germany, Slovenia, Turkey, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada, Korea, China, Australia, New Zealand, and across the United States. Her 13th solo compact disc (concertos including the Pied Piper Fantasy) was released in September 2004 to unanimous acclaim: “Anyone who doubts Still's dumbfounding technical ability or complete tonal control should hear these… You just won't hear better-sustained flute playing on disc than this” (Fanfare Magazine). Still’s 14th CD was released in January 2008 (music for flute and piano with New York-based English pianist Stephen Gosling). “Both performers are constantly praised for their technical prowess and amazing ability to make the most challenging works sound effortless and easy. Reviewers everywhere agree that Alexa Still doesn’t make anything sound tough. She gracefully sprints and hurdles through menacing challenges without seeming to break a sweat. Added to this technical superiority comes an equally superior sensitive musical side. This disc isn’t just flautistic fireworks.” (Sequenza21). Still has also served her profession as president of the National Flute Association (USA), and regularly contributes articles to flute journals across the globe. She plays a silver flute made for her by Brannen Brothers of Boston with gold or wooden headjoints by Sanford Drelinger of White Plains, New York. When her flute is in its case, Still is an avid motorcyclist, and she shares a daughter and two dogs with her husband.
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Concert: The Oberlin Orchestra
A performance by the Oberlin Orchestra with
Raphael Jiménez, conductor
-
When: 8:00pm - 10:00pm
Where: Finney Chapel
Free admission
Liadov: Russian Kikimora, Op.63
Concerto TBA
Prokofiev: Russian Symphony No.7 in C-sharp minor, Op.131
Born in Florida and raised in Venezuela. Raphael Jiménez began his musical life as a violinist. While he was a member of the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, he was assigned his first conducting responsibility at the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras (El Sistema). He was soon conducting all the professional orchestras in the country and was appointed Principal Conductor of the Caracas National Ballet at the age of twenty-two, leading the orchestra in the numerous performances of the most representative works of this genre including Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Firebird, Coppelia, Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, and the Nutcracker among many others.
He began his opera experience as assistant conductor at the Teresa Carreño Center for the Performing Arts and has since served as music director to productions of La Bohème, The Barber of Seville, La Traviata, Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, Florencia en el Amazonas, The Rake’s Progress, Don Giovanni, and The Tales of Hoffmann, to name a few.
Mr. Jiménez devotes great efforts to the promotion of new music, especially of works by Latin American composers, and has been recognized for his diverse and eclectic programming. He has had the privilege of premiering numerous works including the world premiere of “and flowers pick themselves” featured on this recording.
Raphael Jiménez enjoys nowadays a very active career including frequent invitations to conduct symphonic concerts, ballets, and opera productions with critical acclaim. Recent appearances include performances in China with the orchestras of Zhejiang and Guanxi; in Latin America with the symphony orchestras of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Puerto Rico; and leading the opera orchestras of Lubeck in Germany and Palm Beach in Florida. He has also conducted the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, the Florida Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Municipal de Caracas, Lansing Symphony, Battle Creek Symphony, and the Filene Center Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C.
Nostalgia, Ostalgia and the Memory Stick Lecture by Dubravka Ugresic Thurs. Oct. 6, 7:00 pm West Lecture Hall (Science Center)
A prominent Croatian novelist and essayist and one of contemporary Europe's most public commentators, Ugresic will talk about how we become "archivists of our own lives" and whether the treatment of the past is different in post-communist countries.
Part of the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union An Event
Sponsored by The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Book-signing and reading with Dubravka Ugresic,
celebrating the publication in English of her new collection of essays Karaoke Culture. Fri. Oct. 7, 12:00 noon Mindfair Books, 13 West College St.
“Her essays glitter with witty and profound observations. . . . a genuinely free-thinker, Ugresic’s attachment to absurdity leads her down paths where other writers fear to tread.”
—THE INDEPENDENT
Held in conjunction with the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Writer, journalist, and translator Susanne Schädlich
will read from and discuss her book
December, Time and Again: The West, the Stasi, the Uncle, and Me.
Tues. Oct. 11, 7:00 pm. Craig Auditorium (Science Center)
Schädlich is the Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence for the fall semester of 2011 at Oberlin College. She was born in East Germany. Her family was forced to move to West Germany when she was twelve because her father, a writer, ran afoul of the regime. In the early 1990s, after reunification, she learned that her father's brother had worked for many years as an informant for the East German Secret Police. December, Time and Again is an exploration of the complicated histories of her family and of post-war Germany, and an autobiographical account of what it meant to come of age in exile, caught in a no man's land between two seemingly similar yet very different cultures.
"For forty years East Germany was a dictatorship. But after 1961, most of its almost seventeen million citizens did nothing against it. Today when you remind them of this fact, when you tell the truth, they feel personally attacked. They feel a sense of guilt. That makes it difficult to talk about coercion and cowardice. It also engenders a nostalgia – “Ostalgie” – for the past, and an idealization of the political reality of life in the DDR. .... We can’t deal with history by putting on rose-tinted glasses. We must find the courage to tell the truth."
Part of the lecture and film series
Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia
marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by The Department of German Language and Literatures The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Screening of the acclaimed documentary My Perestroika (2010, 87 min.), followed by a Panel Discussion with Oberlin faculty who grew up under Communism in the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc countries, and Yugoslavia.
Thurs. Oct 13, 7:00 pm.
West Lecture Hall (Science Center)
MY PERESTROIKA follows five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times—from their sheltered Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape of post-Soviet Russia. Together, these childhood classmates paint a complex picture of the dreams and disillusionment of those raised behind the Iron Curtain.
“Robin Hessman’s intimate and lovely documentary … follows five classmates who came of age right before the Iron Curtain fell – the children of a vanished world. Charting the ways that time, memory, and a rapidly changing society have affected their lives, it’s playful, insightful, hypnotic, and, ultimately, superb.”— Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
Part of the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Grisha Bruskin, "I and It" (Art Works from "The Soviet Project")
Tues. Oct. 18, 7:00 pm.
Allen Art Building (1937 Addition), Classroom 1
Born in Moscow in 1945, New York-based artist Grisha Bruskin figures prominently in the history of the non-conformist art movement in the Soviet Union and Russia. His work is represented in the permanent collections of MOMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, The Jewish Museum of New York, The Tretyakov Gallery, The State Russian Museum, and many other institutions. In this lecture (the first of two) he will show and discuss various works that form part of his on-going "Soviet Project" and deal with the theme of "I and It"— the interrelationship/alienation between the individual and the collective, the citizen and the state.
Part of the lecture and film series
Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by
The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture The Department of Art The Allen Art Museum
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Goodbye Lenin! Film Screening
Mon. Oct. 3 (German Unity Day!) 7:00 p.m. Craig Auditorium (Science Center)
Berlin, 1990: To protect his fragile and ardently Communist mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared.... (Germany, 2003, comedy, 121 minutes)
This is the first event in the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Sponsored by The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture The Department of German Language and Literatures
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
The Russian Symbolist Dispersion of Light in Poetry and Music: Viacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Skriabin
A talk by Polina Dimova, candidate for the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Russian & Comparative Literature
Monday, March 21, 12:30 p.m. Peters Hall, Room 233
Winter Term Announcement
There are still spaces available in the Winter Term Russian course. Stop by Peters 222 to sign up.
During October the Oberlin Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies will offer a 1 credit course
called "Contraband Canvases: How Modern Soviet Art Found a Home in the Desert." The course explores the lifework of Igor Savitsky (1915-1984), who rescued 44,000 works of unsanctioned Soviet art, then managed to secure funding to display them officially. Far from Kremlin eyes, the Nukus Art Museum in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan holds the second largest collection of Soviet avant-garde art in the world. Suppressed during Stalinism and the following decades, these works offer fresh perspectives on the art and history of the USSR. The course features lectures on the history, politics and culture of the area, as well as a screening of the 2010 award-winning documentary Desert of Forbidden Art and a discussion with film directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev.
First semester, first module
Mon. Oct. 11-14, and 18-20 7-9 p.m, King 106
1 HU credit, P/NP
Oct. 11
Russian 136, "Contraband Canvases: How Modern Soviet Art Found a Home in the Desert" begins tonight at 7 p.m. in King 106. This minicourse, sponsored by the Oberlin Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, explores the lifework of Igor Savitsky (1915-1984), who rescued 44,000 works of unsanctioned Soviet art, then managed to secure funding to display them officially. The course features lectures on the history, politics and culture of the area, as well as a screening of the 2010 award-winning documentary Desert of Forbidden Art and a discussion with the film's directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev.
Oct. 12: "Contraband Canvases," featured speaker: Assistant Visiting Assistant of History Marko Dumancic provides an overview of Central Asian history.
Oct. 13 "Contraband Canvases," featured speakers: Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Tim Scholl and Associate Professor of Russian Arlene Forman present an introduction to Russian Modernist and Socialist Realist art.
Oct. 14 "Contraband Canvases," featured speaker: Associate Professor of Politics Stephen Crowley explores Uzbekistan today.
Monday, Oct. 18 
Public Screening of Desert of Forbidden Art in West Auditorium.
This award-winning 2010 documentary highlights the life and achievements of Igor Savitsky (1915-1984), who rescued 44,000 works of unsanctioned Soviet art and founded a museum to display them. Today, the Nukus Art Museum, located in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, holds the second largest collection of Soviet avant-garde art in the world. This collection, suppressed during Stalinism and the following decades, offers fresh perspectives on the art and history of the USSR.
The Oberlin College screening presents a rare opportunity to see the remarkable story of the man and the museum he
created and to meet the film's directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev.
This event is open and free to the public.
Oct. 19
Desert of Forbidden Art: Round Table Discussion with film directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev.
This event is open and free to the public.
Oct. 20 "Contraband Canvases," featured speaker, Russian and Soviet art historian, Pamela Kachurin of Duke University will deliver the concluding lecture about the Nukus Museum collection.
This lecture is open and free to the public.
You are cordially invited to come to the Russian House this Sunday,Nov. 22nd at 4:00p for a Russian Tea.
There will be red soup and Russian salad.
Maia will be speaking on "Going Abroad and Meeting yourself."
Hope you can make it!
Balkan Music
Performance and Lecture
On November 10th, join The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies and Russian House in welcoming accordionist and ethnographer Walt Mahovlich as OCREECAS Musician and Scholar in Residence.
Grisha Bruskin, "Past Imperfect"
(An Artist's Memories of a Soviet Childhood)
Weds. Oct. 19, 4:30 pm.
West Lecture Hall (Science Center)
This is the second of two lectures by Bruskin. As an artist Bruskin has always been interested in the relationship between text and image. He is also deeply concerned with the nature of individual and collective memory. In the last decade he has published four books of memoirs that form a vibrant textual and visual collage of his own past, his family's past, and his Jewish roots; these books interpose Bruskin's staccato reminiscences, family photographs, and his art. In this lecture Bruskin will read and discuss passages from these memoirs, focusing in particular on his childhood in the Soviet Union. At once lyrical and ironic, Bruskin's prose seems straightforward on the surface, yet is always full of surprises.
Part of the lecture and film series
Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia
marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture The Department of Art The Allen Art Museum
Grisha Bruskin, "Past Imperfect" (An Artist's Memories of a Soviet Childhood)
Weds. Oct. 19, 4:30 pm.
West Lecture Hall (Science Center)
This is the second of two lectures by Bruskin. As an artist Bruskin has always been interested in the relationship between text and image. He is also deeply concerned with the nature of individual and collective memory. In the last decade he has published four books of memoirs that form a vibrant textual and visual collage of his own past, his family's past, and his Jewish roots; these books interpose Bruskin's staccato reminiscences, family photographs, and his art. In this lecture Bruskin will read and discuss passages from these memoirs, focusing in particular on his childhood in the Soviet Union. At once lyrical and ironic, Bruskin's prose seems straightforward on the surface, yet is always full of surprises.
Part of the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture The Department of Art The Allen Art Museum
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
