World-Renowned Performing Arts Season Coming to Westport

The Westport Arts Center (WAC) announces the launch of its Performing Arts Season. The season comprised of Jazz and Chamber Music concerts begins this fall, and will run from Sept. 29 through May 4, 2014. Performers that dazzled audiences from Lincoln Center, Yale School of Music, and the Zagat Rated Smoke Jazz & Supper Club in Harlem will make their debut in Westport.

Leading off of last season’s success of the Juilliard String Quartet, WAC continues to bring world-renowned acts like the Orion String Quartet to Westport for all to enjoy. Widely acclaimed by prominent publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian (London), La Presse (Montreal), the performers in the Westport Arts Center’s 2013 - 2014 line-up will bring music known throughout the Chamber Music and Jazz worlds to Fairfield County.

There will be five Jazz performances, including two Jazz Jams, and five Chamber Music concerts. The Westport Arts Center is honored to have curators Brian Torff and Russell Platt lead the season again this year. Torff is the head of the Music Department at Fairfield University and is also a bassist, composer, and author. Russell Platt, a Westport native, is a composer and a senior editor for classical music at The New Yorker.

The Chamber Music season features classical guitarist Eliot Fisk, whose teacher and mentor, classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, was known for establishing the guitar as a classical concert instrument. "I consider Eliot Fisk as one of the most brilliant, intelligent and gifted young musical artists of our times, not only amongst guitarists but in all the general field of instrumentalists,” said Andrés Segovia.

Pianist Janina Fialkowska, the up-and-coming Voxare String Quartet, and renowned New York ensemble Orion String Quartet are also on the schedule. Young pianist Michael Brown is noted by The New York Times as “a young piano visionary” with a "powerful technique and a vivid imagination.” Gramophone writes, "Soloist Michael Brown play[s] with great confidence and rhythmic flair….” The New Haven Register says, “Brown is a brilliant young talent.”

The Westport Arts Center is honored to have acclaimed Jazz vocalist Giacomo Gates perform the music of Miles Davis and Gil-Scott-Heron. The Hartford Courant says, "Giacomo Gates, Jazz troubadour, worldly wise and grand master of scat and Vocalese, is one of the Jazz world's finest living exemplars of true grit."

The Jazz season will also feature the ‘Art of the Jazz Piano Trio,’ featuring Nick Sanders on piano, Brian Torff on bass, and Kurt Leon on drums; Jim Clark Jazz Saxophone Giants, and New Duke - Fairfield University Jazz Professors.

Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased atwww.westportartscenter.org and (203) 222-7070.

Photo credit: Lois Greenfield

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Submitted by Norwalk, CT

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