Elizabethtown College’s School of Arts and Humanities recently announced the fall performance lineup for its popular Monday Series Concerts.
All concerts in the series are free and open to the public. The series, which takes place in Etown’s Leffler Chapel & Performance Center, will run from Sept. 23 through Oct. 21. Performers include talented musicians from both the Etown campus community, along with special performances by local groups, including the Ephrata Cloister Chorus.
Charter Week Kick-Off Faculty Concert | Sept. 23 at 7:30 p.m. | Leffler Chapel and Performance Center
Celebrate the start of Etown’s Charter Week with a concert featuring performances by Elizabethtown College faculty. This 125th-anniversary celebration concert will feature musical numbers with connections to 1899 – the year of Etown’s founding. Performers include Music faculty members Justin Badgerow, Douglas Bomberger, Brent Behrenshausen, Emily Frantz, Anne Gross, Paula Nelson, and Faith Shiffer, who will interpret works by Beethoven, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Messager, and Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro.
Images and Pictures featuring Amy E. Gustafson, Piano | Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m. | Leffler Chapel and Performance Center
Recent Etown adjunct faculty member, pianist Amy E. Gustafson returns to play a diverse program of music that conjures the imagination and awakens the artistic spirit with works by Claude Debussy, Lera Auerbach, and Modest Mussorgsky.
Stories Through Time: Solos and Collaborative Works for Saxophone and Piano | Oct. 14 at 7:30 p.m. | Leffler Chapel and Performance Center
Join us for solo and collaborative performances from Professor of Music Justin Badgerow (alto saxophone) and Professor of Piano at Indiana University of Pennsylvania Henry Wong Doe (piano), featuring music from around the world and spanning several centuries.
Several significant saxophone transcriptions from Baroque violin repertoire will be featured including works of Bach and Handel. Other saxophone transcriptions include music by Ibert, Gershwin, and Rachmaninov. Dr. Wong Doe will perform solo music of Haydn, Debussy, and a new work by New Zealand composer Penelope Axtens. The duo will end the program joining forces at the piano with two dramatic piano duets of Dvořák.
Celebrating the Music of Ephrata with the Ephrata Cloister Chorus | Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. | Leffler Chapel and Performance Center
Join us for this special concert that will feature the Ephrata Cloister Chorus performing four pieces composed at Ephrata and found in the Ephrata Cloister’s 1739 hymnal, Zionitischer Weyrauchs-Hügel.
Co-sponsored by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, the program will also include music composed at the Lititz Moravian community, along with selections from the Shaker community of Mt. Lebanon, N.Y., music of William Billings, African American Spiritual hymnody, and several contemporary sacred anthems.
Preceding the concert, Etown Archivist Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh will describe extensive conservation work completed in 2023 on two rare Ephrata music manuscript books housed in the College’s Hess Archives and Special Collections. Both books were created by hand at the Cloister in the mid-eighteenth century and contain beautiful examples of Pennsylvania German Fraktur.