Orchestra opens season with Horseheads native
Concert Sunday at Clemens Center in Elmira
The opening concert for the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes’ 22nd season season — under the baton of music director / conductor Toshi Shimada — will be held at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Clemens Center in Elmira.
The space-themed concert will begin with a performance of John Williams' “Star Wars Overture,” followed by Franz Liszt’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” and concluding with Gustav Holst's musical story of the solar system, “The Planets.”
The featured soloist on the concerto will be pianist Benjamin Pawlak, a Horseheads native and Ithaca College senior who grew up grew up attending OSFL rehearsals with his mother and performed with the OSFL Youth Orchestra.
Two-time winner of the Ithaca College School of Music Concerto Competition, he made his solo debut in 2014 playing Prokofiev's “Piano Concerto No. 1” with the School of Music's symphony orchestra, and in 2016 he performed Maurice Ravel's “Concerto in G Major.”
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At Ithaca College, Pawlak studies with Yale and Juilliard alumnus Vadim Serebryany, and from 2009-15, he attended the Credo Chamber Music Festival at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music where he studied under chamber coaches James Howsmon and Alvin Chow of the Oberlin Conservatory piano faculty, Steuart Pincombe of the baroque chamber group Apollo's Fire, principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Anne Martindale Williams, and the late dean emeritus of The Juilliard School Stephen Clapp.
Tickets for Sunday’s concert are $45, $35 and $15 ($10 for college students; children under 18 admitted free); go online to www.clemenscenter.com. For information on season subscriptions, call 936-2873 or visit www.osfl.org.