Music
• BMC concert benefits Brooks House relief efforts: On Sunday, May 1, at 4 p.m., pianist Chonghyo Shin with flutist Alex Ogle, violinist Michelle Liechti, and cellist Sabine Rhyne will present a program of Beethoven sonatas at Centre Congregational Church in Brattleboro.
On the program are Ludwig van Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69 (1808); Violin Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 96 (1812); and Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major, Op. 24 (1801), known as the “Spring” sonata. Shin, Ogle, Liechti, and Rhyne are all members of the Brattleboro Music Center's Music School faculty.
Tickets are $15, free to BMC Music School students under 22. Proceeds from the concert will be donated to the Green Mountain Chapter of the American Red Cross and the United Way of Windham County to assist with relief efforts following the Brooks House fire in Brattleboro.
For further information, call the BMC at 802-257-4523 or visit www.bmcvt.org.
• Concert to benefit YMCA Scholarship Fund: The Mast will perform a benefit concert for the Y's Reach Out to Youth Scholarship Fund, at the New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro on Friday, May 6, at 8 p.m. Proceeds will provide financial support for hundreds of area children to access the Y's ASPIRE afterschool program, Snow Days program and Lewis Day Camp.
The Mast is the latest project by the Brooklyn-based vocalist/poet Haale and percussionist/producer Matt Kilmer. Before they launched The Mast in 2010, Haale and Matt Kilmer were writing, performing, and touring together for three years under Haale's name. The Mast will release their debut album, Wild Poppies, in the next few months. The Brattleboro event will showcase their new work.
Pictures submitted to the Y's Healthy Kids Photo Contest will be on display in NEYT's lobby for Gallery Walk from 6-8pm. The Gallery Walk event is free and open to the public. Tickets for The Mast show are $15 each and are available at www.meetingwatersymca.org or by calling the Y's Brattleboro office at 802-246-1036. If not sold out in advance, tickets will also be available at the door. Healthy refreshments made by Brattleboro families in the Y's ASPIRE program will be for sale before during the Gallery Walk event before the show.
• Jazz Jubilee with Samirah Evans: On Saturday, May 7, Youth Services will be holding its 13th annual Jazz Jubilee & Silent Auction from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Old Tavern at Grafton.
This popular benefit will feature entertainment by professional jazz and blues vocalist, Samirah Evans and Her Handsome Devils Trio, an electrifying ensemble. The trio complements Samirah's style perfectly, which is a mix of swampy, sultry, and soulful takes on jazz standards and originals. Evans has often been compared to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.
Joining them for several tunes is youth guest vocal soloist Chloe Lake, from The Putney School. Lake has been a soprano in the Putney School Madrigals singing group as well as the Moyse Chorale. She is now the main vocalist for The Putney School Jazz Combo.
The gala at the Old Tavern at Grafton will begin at 4:30 p.m. with a cocktail hour and silent auction. At 6 p.m., a four-course meal will be served. Silent auction bidding will close after coffee and dessert. The jazz performances will begin at 8 p.m. in a cabaret setting in Phelps Barn.
Tickets are $85 ($55 of which is tax deductible) and proceeds will benefit the many programs of Youth Services such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Juvenile Court Diversion, the Runaway Program, Transitional Living and Peer Outreach. Call 802-257-0361 for reservations or visit www.youthservicesinc.org/jazz for more information and tickets.
• Meet the composer: On Monday, May 9, at 7:15 p.m., the Windham Orchestra invites the public to attend an open rehearsal of Derrik Jordan's newly commissioned work, Windham Loops, at the Robert H. Gibson River Garden in Brattleboro. The rehearsal is free and open to all.
The Windham Orchestra and Impulse Ensemble, under the direction of Hugh Keelan, will premier Windham Loops during the orchestra's Ode to Joy concert on the Brattleboro Retreat lawn on Sunday, June 12, at 3 p.m. The orchestra commissioned Jordan to compose this original work that fuses classical and world music.
Impulse Ensemble's three members will be playing a host of instruments seldom found in an orchestra: Tony Vacca on Balafon and a scaffolded wall of exotic percussion instruments, Jim Matus on electric Greek Lute or Laouto, and Jordan on Five String Electric Violin. Visually and aurally, they will be fascinating as they explore this new music with the standard strings, winds and percussion of the Windham Orchestra.
For more information, call the Brattleboro Music Center at 802-257-4523, or visit www.bmcvt.org or www.windhamorchestra.org.
Poetry
• Martin Espada reads new work: Marlboro College presents an evening of poetry with Martín Espada on Monday, May 2, at 7 p.m., in Ragle Hall.
Called “the Latino poet of his generation,” Espada has published more than 15 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His reading will focus on his newly published collection, The Trouble Ball and the 2006 book, The Republic of Poetry, which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.
Espada has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the USA Simon Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, and The Nation. Espada currently teaches poetry and English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and was recently named Poet Laureate of Northampton, Mass. The reading is free and open to the public.
Lectures
• Looking at a murder-suicide: Author and professor Gail Griffin visits Marlboro College for a free, public reading and discussion of her 2010 book, The Events of October: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus on Sunday, May 1, at 7 p.m. in Ragle Hall.
The Events of October (Wayne State University Press) tells the true story of a male student killing his ex-girlfriend and then himself during Homecoming weekend at Kalamazoo College in 1999. In the wake of this tragedy, the community of the small, idyllic liberal arts college struggled to characterize the incident. Griffin's account puts a very real face on issues of violence against women, using the story to explore larger issues of intimate partner violence, gun accessibility, and depression and suicide on college campuses.
Gail Griffin is the Parfet Distinguished Professor of English at Kalamazoo College, a poet and essayist, and the author of two volumes of nonfiction, Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue and Season of the Witch: Border Lines, Marginal Notes.
• Changing face of Islam: Mount Holyoke College professor Kavita Datla will address how Islam has been transformed in South Asian countries in a talk at Brattleboro's Brooks Memorial Library on May 4. Her talk, “The Changing Face of Islam: Transformation in Modern South Asia,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council's First Wednesdays lecture series and takes place at 7 p.m.
Looking at Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, Datla will consider the need to shift from a “Clash of Civilizations” model of Islam to considering how transformations in Islam share something with transformations in other religions.
For more information, contact Brooks Memorial Library at 802-254-5290 or contact the Vermont Humanities Council at 802-262-2626 or [email protected], or visit www.vermonthumanities.org. “The Changing Face of Islam” is sponsored by Centre Congregational Church.
Books
• Julia Spencer-Fleming comes to Brattleboro: Mystery on Main Street, New England's only bookstore devoted exclusively to tales of mystery and suspense, will host an author signing with best-selling author Julia Spencer-Fleming, Saturday, April 30, at 3 p.m. Julia Spencer-Fleming introduces her long-awaited book One Was A Soldier, the seventh in her series featuring Claire Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne.
In One Was A Soldier, The Rev. Clare Fergusson wants to forget the things she saw as a combat helicopter pilot and concentrate on her relationship with Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne. But coming home is harder than it looks. Since their first meeting, Russ and Clare's bond has been tried, torn, and forged by adversity. But when he rules the veteran's death a suicide, she violently rejects his verdict, drawing vets into an unorthodox investigation that threatens jobs, relationships, and her own future with Russ. As the days cool and the nights grow longer, they will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny town to the upper ranks of the Army.
All events are free and open to the public. If you cannot make an event, but would like an autographed copy of One Was A Soldier, contact Mystery on Main Street. For information, reservations ,or to reserve books, call 802-258-2211 or email [email protected].
Visual arts
• Travels in the Dominican Republic: For Compass School students, international travel goes far beyond historical sites, museum visits and guidebooks - it's an up-close, personal, true grit approach where students experience culture by living it.
Compass School students will share slides and stories from their extraordinary travel experience in the Dominican Republic at the Rockingham Free Public Library on Tuesday, May 3, at 7 p.m. This free presentation has a theatrical quality, combining images and thought provoking vignettes to convey the qualities of connecting with lives very different from our own.
The heart of this year's trip to the Domincan Republic was a week of family stays in the tiny farming village of Tres Ceibas, a community of primitive homes without running water and sporadic electricity where life is much the same as it was 100 years ago. The second week involved a few days of “vacation,” before moving on to Santiago to work with Peace Corps projects helping orphaned shoe-shine boys from Haiti and a women's education project in one of the city's poor barrios.
While much of this trip is about serving Dominican communities, the real service is in personal connections between individuals from our country and theirs-sharing from the heart in way that makes the world a more peaceful and caring place.
• Meet me at the Fair: Blue Ribbons and Burlesque, a photography exhibit by Charles Fish, will open at the Moore Free Library's Crowell Gallery, 23 West St., Newfane, on Saturday, May 7, at 9 a.m. A reception will be held that day from 2-5 p.m. to meet the photographer and share memories of visits to fairs.
Fish grew up a mile from Essex Junction's Champlain Valley Exposition, Vermont's biggest fair, at a time when fairs loomed large in the imagination of a boy and in the yearly calendar of farmers and town folk alike. Local excellence was honored in the exhibits of 4-H projects, handcrafts, needlework, vegetables, baking, and canning. Horse and ox teams competed in the pulling ring, and pacers and trotters showed off their stuff on the track. But there were exotic elements too. The boundaries of the acceptable were pushed back in the freak shows and girlie shows; striptease otherwise seldom appeared in small town Vermont.
Some 40 years ago, Fish revisited the fairs camera in hand. From these forays came the approximately 200 photographs (accompanied by text) that appeared in his 1998 book, Blue Ribbons and Burlesque: A Book of Country Fairs. A selection of pictures from the book, plus many more from recent fairs, will be on view at the Crowell Gallery from May 7-May 28 during library hours.
Vermont author Chris Bohjalian called the book an “absolute joy.” Books are not for sale at the present exhibit, but the public is invited simply to enjoy the pictures and to recall their own experiences at the country fairs of Vermont and beyond. For more information, call librarian Meris Morrison at 802-365-7948.