SMT to welcome pianist, chanter as guest Montague Artist

Pianist and chanter Dr. Paul Barnes, who electrifies audiences with his intensely expressive playing and cutting-edge programming, will bring his talents to Heidelberg on Friday, March 31. The School of Music & Theatre’s Distinguished Montague Artist will perform a concert beginning at 7 p.m. in Ohl Concert Hall (Brenneman Music Hall). 

For his Heidelberg concert, he will perform his latest recital, Illumination, which features a contemplative and cathartic program of piano works inspired by the mystical world of chant. Himself a Greek Orthodox chanter, Barnes has collaborated most recently with Philip Glass and Victoria Bond to create piano works based on ancient byzantine and Jewish chant (Illuminations on Byzantine Chant, Annunciation). Additional new chant-based works by Native American flutist Ron Warren and David von Kampen (The Way of Mountains and Desert, Soaring Oranges) are also on the program. All four of these works recently received their world premiere performances.

Barnes, who resides in Lima, is currently collaborating with Hollywood film composer JAC Redford on a new work inspired by the incarnational writing of Plato, to be premiered at the St. Constantine School in Houston this July. His recordings are available on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon. 

Barnes is the Marguerite Scribante Professor of Music at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Glenn Korff School of Music. He was recently appointed artistic director of the Lied Center Piano Academy, which welcomes several high-school pianists to Lincoln each summer for an intensive week of piano, composition, improvisation and collaboration. He will also be teaching this summer in Greece at the Piano Plus Summer Institute. In great demand as a pedagogue and clinician, Barnes has served as convention artist at several state MTNA conventions, most recently at Virginia and was named "Teacher of the Year” by the Nebraska Music Teachers
Association.

The concert is free and open to the public. For additional information, contact the School of Music & Theatre at (419) 448-2073.