UW Symphony Orchestra Opening Performance Oct. 7

The University of Wyoming Symphony Orchestra (UWSO) is back onstage, welcoming a live audience for the first time in nearly two years.

The opening concert of the season is at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7, in the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts concert hall. The performance also will be offered via livestream by going here.

Opening-night tickets cost $12 for adults; $8 for senior citizens; $6 for students not attending UW; and free to UW students with a W number. To purchase tickets, visit the Performing Arts box office or the Wyoming Union information desk, call (307) 766-6666 or go online at www.uwyo.edu/finearts.

“The orchestra’s season is one of joy and reflection -- joy that we are back onstage and reflection on all that has happened these past many months,” says Michael Griffith, UWSO music director.

The symphony orchestra, guided by COVID-19 safety standards, will perform with masks, with the wind players having covers over their instruments’ bells. Griffith encourages audience members to wear masks, with the first few rows of the concert hall empty, creating a space between the orchestra and the audience.

Selections for the concert include the overture to Johann Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus”; the intermezzo from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana”; and, followed by an intermission, the orchestra will perform Beethoven’s First Symphony. Mezzo-soprano Katrina Zook, a UW Department of Music professor, will sing Ravel’s impressionistic “Three Poems by Mallarmé” and two arias by Handel.

Zook, a professor of voice and a 23-year member of the music faculty, recently was appointed chair of the department. Her operatic credits include leading roles in “Le nozze di Figaro,” “Cosí fan tutte,” “Carmen,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” “Albert Herring” and “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Her recent performances include works with the Laramie Civic Chorus, the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra, the Cheyenne Symphony, the Larimer Chorale with the Colorado Chamber Orchestra, the UWSO and chamber music recitals with faculty colleagues.

Zook is the recipient of several UW faculty awards, including a yearlong sabbatical when she studied anatomy and physiology of the voice, and observed pedagogy courses and vocology lab work at institutions around the country.

She, along with colleagues David Jones, dean of the UW College of Health Sciences, and Holly Dalrymple, an associate professor of music, is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary UW Vocology Lab, housed in the Performing Arts Center. Zook holds performance degrees from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the Eastman School of Music.

To help support the UWSO, membership brochures -- with donation cards -- are available by calling (307) 766-6666, or donate online here.