September 7, 2023 – Santa Fe College Professor of Music and pianist Mitch McKay will perform a solo concert that features uplifting music at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 29, 2023, in the Jackson N. Sasser Fine Arts Hall at the Northwest Campus, 3000 NW 83 Street, Gainesville.
Tickets are $15 for adults; $9 for seniors, students, military service members and children 12 and under; and free for SF students, faculty, and staff with college ID cards. Tickets are available from the Fine Arts Hall box office at 352-395-4181 or online from Showpass at showpass.com/mitch-mckay-3.
“For this concert, I’ll be playing Schubert’s ‘Piano Sonata in A Major D. 959,’ Chopin’s ‘Scherzo No. 3,’ and two études by H. Leslie Adams,” McKay said. “I chose this music because it lifts me up and reduces my stress, and I hope it will do the same for the audience!”
McKay will perform on the college’s full-size concert grand piano. “Playing the Steinway in the Fine Arts Hall takes full advantage of the hall’s excellent acoustics,” he explained.
Born in Vienna in 1797, Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. He is best known for his songs and chamber music although he also wrote symphonies, masses and music for the piano. The sonata that McKay will perform in this program was written in the last months of Schubert’s life, between the spring and autumn of 1828, and is recognized as one of his last major compositions for solo piano.
Born in 1810 in the Duchy of Warsaw, Frédéric Chopin was a Polish child prodigy, virtuoso pianist and composer of the Romantic period. At 21, he settled in Paris where he lived for the rest of his life. Chopin is world renowned for his solo piano compositions. A scherzo, like the piece McKay will perform, is described as a vigorous, light, or playful composition.
H. Leslie Adams is an African American composer who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. He is best known for writing choral music, including the music drama “Blake” about the lives of African American slaves on the eve of the Civil War. Adams has also written many purely instrumental works. Between 1997 and 2007, he composed “Twenty-Six Études for Solo Piano.” A piano étude or “study” is a composition that is designed to build performance skills while, at the same time, being pleasing to the ear.
McKay’s concert is organized and sponsored by the Santa Fe College Fine and Performing Arts and Entertainment Technology Department. For more information about the concert, call McKay at 352-395-5144. For ticket information, call the SF Box Office at 352-395-4181.