Stop. Look. Listen.

The Pennsylvania Academy of Music joins the First Friday lineup again for April, with its first community open house since its opening last June. The open house will take place 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and feature tours of the Philip Johnson-designed building, informal performances by student ensembles from the piano, voice, wind, string and guitar departments, and refreshments in the enclosed rooftop atrium. A concert by the Newstead Trio will follow at 8 p.m., featuring works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and a world premiere of Adrienne Albert’s “Musescapes.”  Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for students and free for children three and under.

The Lancaster Quilt & Textile Museum will also offer free admission after 5 p.m. on Friday, and a reception for its new “Rainbow Yarn” exhibit of Navajo weavings as well.

The Millersville University Chorale will present “Songs of Children” by Robert Convery, a musical setting of poems written by children in the Terezin concentration camp, Thursday (April 2) at 7:30 p.m. The chorus will be accompanied by Jonathan Lefever, piano; MaryLee Yerger, violin; Madeleine Darmiento, viola, and Steven Lavender, cello. The composer will speak before the concert. Tickets are $10. More information here.

The Colorado Quartet presented a very meditative, moving conclusion to the Gretna Music’s 2008-2009 season at Elizabethtown College Sunday evening with Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.” The work is framed by an introduction and a dramatic finale, and four local clergymen — Father David Danneker, Pastor William N. Jackson, Pastor Greg Davidson Laszakovits and Pastor David Martin — provided short meditations on the words before the seven sections.

Haydn’s music illuminates the words of the dying Jesus with the subtlest of harmonic touches and “hushed, heartbeat pulsations” (as Carl Kane put it in his program notes). Emotional high points were the harmonic twists and turns in section 1, “Father, forgive them;” the plaintive “calling” notes in section III, “Dear woman, here is your son;” the yearning melody of section IV, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the interplay of the violins in section VI, “It is finished.” Section VII, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” a summation and conclusion to the previous sections, conveyed an atmosphere of deep peace.  The quartet’s performance emphasised the silences as well as the notes, echoing the slowing breaths of a dying man and opening up the texture. Into these gaps pour our attention, our thoughts, our prayers. The finale, “The Earthquake,” was all the more devastating by comparison, harsh, loud, sudden, jerking the listener back into the world.

With the conclusion of this year’s series, attention turns to the summer festival, Music at Gretna 2009. The series, which starts July 31, runs through August and concludes Sept. 6, will have a certain folk inflection, with performances by the Mose Allison Trio, the Duquesne Tamburitzans, Le Vent du Nord playing traditional music from Quebec, and Leon Redbone on the roster. Classical performers include the Wister Quartet, with violist Kerri Ryan and guitarist Allen Krantz in separate concerts; the Chestnut Brass Company; the Momenta String Quartetl; the Trio Solisti; the Audubon Quartet, with flutist Carl Ellenberger, clarinetist James Campbell and harpist Jude Mollenhauer in one concert and bassist Emilio Gravagno in an all-Dvorak program. A performance of Pergolesi’s opera “La Serva Padrona” is also scheduled. Jazz performers will include the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, drummer Rob Henderson and the Karenda Devroop Trio, the Cedar Walton Trio, the Phil Giordano Jazz Orchestra, singers Claudia Acuna and Hilary Kole.

Looking even further ahead, Gretna Music’s 2009-2010 season at Elizabethtown College includes duo pianists Marcantonio Barone and Charles Abramovic, the Raleigh Ringers (the pre-eminent handbell choir in the U.S., according to Gretna Music), the Vienna Boys Choir, Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with cellist Truls Mørk.

The new Rosa Rosa Late Jazz club held a preview Thursday — here are a few scenes, featuring Mayor Rick Gray getting ready to cut the ribbon and the Max Puglia Quartet in performance. The club will open to the public tonight (Friday, March 27), with the Tim Warfield Band performing at 10:30 and Max Puglia at 12:30. (More information here.)According to Rosa Rosa partner Adriano Isernia, the club will provide a much-needed showcase for jazz, a place to simply go have a drink and listen to music without having to have dinner, and in a different atmosphere from that of a restaurant. While the club is a part of the Rosa Rosa Ristorante Italiano, it will have a new face for after hours — a new logo, new lighting, new uniforms for the staff, Isernia says.

“I’m making everyone work harder this time,” says Tim Nies, whose current show at the Mulberry Art Studios, “Dichotomy,” combines elements of installation, collage, found art and painting.
Dichotomy binds us together and tears us apart, Nies says in his artist’s statement: “Dichotomy describes plant and cell growth, astronomical phenomenon and the mutually exclusive contradiction of thought and action.”
Paintings of organic or abstract forms incorporate discarded electrical equipment, sometimes within repurposed frames, and are linked by a diagram on one wall. Other paintings incorporate unconventional techniques such as a controlled rust staining that looks accidental, but is the result of deliberate spraying of iron objects with a mixture of water and vinegar and laying them on canvas — in one large work, this takes on something like a yin-yang form. On the other hand, a framed canvas is hung backward to display a stain that is entirely accidental but nevertheless evocative of a landscape.
In another work, a window frame contains old math flash cards, some mounted upside down so that the sums are still readable, yet wrong. Yet another flash card rests within a cabinet of found objects, containing the dire sum “9+5=Death.”
This is his second show at the Mulberry Art Studios in about a year, and he seems to have moved away from the rigorous investigations of “Worlds Within Worlds” into a slightly looser mode. With its scrawled words and educational artifacts, its rust marks and damaged wires, the works allude to primary-school education rather than quantum mechanics, the actual results of the process of time, rather than theories about time.
Incidentally, the 8-foot-by-8-foot “Worlds Within Worlds,” the title work of the earlier exhibition, is on display at the Goggleworks Center for the Arts in Reading as part of the “Curator’s Choice” show that runs through April 5.

In “Paper, Light and Shadow,” artist A. Paul Lambert, inspired by Dale Chihuly and other glass artists, has created forms in paper that play off translucency and opacity in a similar manner, sculptures that are sometimes lit from within. “I really wanted the shadows to speak for themselves … I really like black and white,” Lambert commented at a First Friday reception at the Mulberry Art Studios, 21 N. Mulberry St. Like Chihuly, Lambert has drawn his inspiration from natural and organic forms. The names of the pieces — Zeolite (left), Isostacy (right), Ionic Bond (lower left and right), Surface Wave, Atoll — represent geologic forms  and “anything that flows: sound waves, ocean waves, seismic waves,” Lambert said. The reception also featured an unusual snack: homemade fortune cookies containing, instead of lottery numbers, questions to ask the artist. “Ask the artist about complex shapes from simple forms,” was one. “Ask the artist why he uses paper,” was another. (Answer is here.) The show runs through March.

Tomorrow: Tim Nies

My review of Sunday’s second Chamber Music Series concert is posted here. The next concert won’t be until May 17, with two big works planned: Brahm’s Sextet in B flat Major, Op. 18 and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70. Details here. So far, so good: I hope the LSO does this again next year! It’s been an outstanding series so far, with both thought-provoking and emotion-evoking programs. Sunday’s concert seemed to concern, in some way, the music of imperiled peoples: Bartok’s Hungarian, Rumanian and other Eastern European peasants, Hubay’s Gypsies, Bloch’s Hassidic Jews. And Brahms, while situated solidly in the Germanic tradition, often looked to Hungarian and Gypsy music for inspiration.

Six emerging artists in residence are the focus of the EAR Show at Millersville University’s Sykes Gallery in Breidenstein Hall.  Sophia Flood, Lindsay Carone, Erin McSorley, Stan Sulewski, Matthew Jakielski and Ku Hsin-yi will show the results of a year’s work in ceramics, print and sculpture. A reception and artist talks will take place today (Monday, March 23) from 5 to 8 p.m. The exhibit runs until April 9.

Live broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera Saturday: Bellini’s La Sonnambula, with Natalie Dessay as Amina, 1 p.m., Penn Cinema. Here are some reviews: it seems Mary Zimmerman’s production received a critical reception but the singing and acting are getting more love. Besides, Dessay is being a good sport about the whole thing. (HT to About Last Night for the audio link.)

This will be a deep blue Friday in Lancaster, with the Chameleon Club’s Blues Fest, with Johnny Winter, the Nighthawks, Blue Light Special & Ragtime Willie, starting at 7, and the last installment of the Lancaster Arts Hotel Gallery’s Midwinter Bluesfest, featuring the Billy Penn Project, starting at 5. The gallery also will be opening an exhibit of digitally solarized photographs by Milt Friedly of rodeo scenes in Wyoming, his home state. If that doesn’t fill up the evening, there’s Music Friday, with performers all over town. Check here for details.