This is Vero’s weekend to revel in great music from the 1950’s rock ‘n roll of Riverside’s “Memphis,” to opera, orchestral and vintage folk.
Friday night, the finals of the Marcello Giordani International Vocal Competitions take place in the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center, with a $10,000 grand prize at stake. The top singers, winnowed from a field of 70 to 80 from 12 countries who’ve been competing here all week, will deliver their best in a concert format, with a panel of judges – including Giordani and Jonathan Friend, artistic administrator of the Metropolitan Opera – seated in the midst of an audience that typically joins in the judging on its own.
Then Saturday night, the winners will perform along with Giordani, wrapping up the Vero Beach Opera season. Both concerts begin at 7 p.m. Tickets for each start at $30.
Not far from the PAC, the 1970s folk singer Janis Ian performs Friday at the Emerson Center, along with fellow folkster Tom Paxton. Ian, who turned 64 on Tuesday, won a Grammy award for “At Seventeen” in 1975, and another more recently, for Best Spoken Word Album – her autobiography, “Society’s Child,” published in 2013.
Paxton is a singer/songwriter whose folk songs have been recorded by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul and Mary, among many others. He won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Grammies. At a January concert, Paxton reportedly told his audience this may be his last tour. As the tour’s Vero promoter Rusty Young told Vero Beach 32963 (Vero News), “If they want to see them perform, they better go now.” The new Masters of Music series, targeted at an older demographic, is continuing next year.
And also on Friday, at Community Church, Keith Lockhart conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra at the final concert of the Indian River Symphonic Association’s season. The all-classical concert, which features Charlie Albright on piano, includes the music of Ravel, Britten and Vaughan Williams, and Vero’s Anglophiles will particularly enjoy William Walton’s “Crown Imperial,” at the end of the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William.
Space Coast Symphony Orchestra performs here Sunday offering Rodion Shchedrin’s “Carmen Suite,” the music behind Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso’s famous ballet. Both the music and the ballet came at the suggestion of Shchedrin’s wife, the Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Shchedrin played on Bizet’s melodies by scoring the strings and percussion lines with rhythmic and harmonic twists.
The concert will also include Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts’ “Concerto for Oboe and Strings,” commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra for its “Prelude” concert series, and premiering at the Kennedy Center in 1997. In Vero, Kristin Naigus solos on oboe; she is a graduate of the University of Michigan and earned her master’s in oboe performance from the University of Florida.
Space Coast opens the concert with Samuel Barber’s heart-clutching “Adagio for Strings.”
In that orchestra’s home turf of Melbourne, six guitarists come together at the King Center Saturday night to perform a concert that ranges from progressive rock to jazz. The music combines the steel-stringed guitars of California Guitar Trio and the nylon-stringed guitars of Montreal Guitar Trio.
And Sunday night, the multi-Grammy award-winning Canadian jazz vocalist and pianist Diana Krall brings not jazz but pop music to the King Center. Last fall, her latest album, Wallflower, had its release delayed – as well as its promotional tour – due to Krall suffering a case of severe pneumonia. On the mend now, Krall offers us songs that influenced her in her illustrious career, including a little-known Bob Dylan song, “Wallflower,” the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’“, and the Eagles’ “Desperado.” The tour also debuts a new song by Paul McCartney, “If I Take You Home Tonight.” Krall has sold more albums than any other female jazz artist in the past 30 years.
Sunday’s Poetry Barbecue at the Laura Riding Jackson house begins with a free poetry-writing workshop for high school students, led by Lawrence Hetrick, an associate professor of poetry at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta, and before that, at the University of Florida and Miami-Dade Community College. Hetrick, a Gainesville native whose dad taught entomology at UF, read his poems at last year’s Poetry Barbecue.
The Teen Writers Workshop, sponsored by the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation, is from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., when the grownups rush in for readings by an assemblage of renowned poets curated by Vero’s own ought-to-be poet laureate, Sean Sexton. The readings are followed by a barbecue with cold beer, decent wine and great bluegrass by the Hot Sauce Boys. The Laura Riding Jackson house is on the grounds of the Environmental Learning Center off the Wabasso Causeway.
If you prefer to church hop on Sunday, there are two wildly different concerts to enjoy. The first, Sunday afternoon at 3, is at Christ by the Sea Methodist Church, where music director Marcos Flores is giving a concert he’s calling “Appassionata,” with works by Bach and Chopin, as well as Paul Gay, a composer and retired Boston-area classical trombonist and conductor who now lives in Vero.
And Sunday night, Community Church welcomes Ryan Kasten at his first public concert in his new role as Director of Music. His appointment follows eight months as interim director. Kasten has been associate director for five years.
While Kasten will direct the church choir at the Sunday morning services, things will go from dignified to Disney-fied that evening with a concert of Disney tunes performed by the Atlantic Ringers. The annual concert’s light theme fittingly includes the debut of the Atlantic Youth Ringers. It’s free and starts at 7 p.m.