Arts & Culture

Three campus ensembles will join forces April 26 for the 2009 Chancellor’s Concert. The Washington University Jazz Band will open the program with a selection of big band scores. The Washington University Symphony Orchestra will perform music of Leonard Bernstein and Robert Schumann while the Washington University Concert Choir will present a selection of popular opera choruses. To conclude the program, all three ensembles will share the stage for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Rirkrit Tiravanija creates spare yet provocative installations designed to blur lines between art and life, transforming galleries and museums into ephemeral social spaces for cooking meals, playing music and hanging out. Beginnin in May the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will showcase one recent project with its exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija: Chew the Fat, a multifaceted video installation that together profiles a loose-knit group of 12 internationally known artists.

The Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging is hosting the 2009 Friedman Conference April 21 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center from 8:30 a.m.-1 p.m. The conference, titled “In the Words of the Artist: The Influence of Age on Creativity and Expression,” focuses on the ways artists experience the aging process and how it affects creativity and expression.

Washington University’s Eliot Trio will perform music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 19, in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall. Named for Washington University founder William Greenleaf Eliot, the trio consists of Seth Carlin, professor of music and director of the piano program in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences; violinist David Halen, concertmaster for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, also with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Nonfiction writer and St. Louis native Nick Reding will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 16, for Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. Reding is the author of The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia (2001), which explores a semi-nomadic culture that was once thought to have all put disappeared at the end of the 19th century.

Armies burning with religious fervor, towns overrun by mercenary violence, a family disintegrating amidst the crossfire. Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is widely considered the greatest anti-war play of the 20th century. Later this month Washington University’s Performing Arts Department will present this epic tale of a protective yet all-too pragmatic matriarch as its spring Mainstage production.

St. Louis’ Arianna String Quartet, widely hailed as among the nation’s finest chamber ensembles, will be joined by renowned pianist Seth Carlin, professor of music in Arts & Sciences, for a concert of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Erno Dohnanyi and Robert Schumann.

Stanford classics professor Richard Martin discusses Homeric poetry as a performance art in Ancient Greece, comparing it to modern rap, in the annual Assembly Series Biggs lecture at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 9 in Steinberg Hall.

Three prominent writers will examine “African American Literature Today” at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 15, in Hurst Lounge. The discussion — sponsored by the African & African-American Studies Program and by the Center for the Humanities, both in Arts & Sciences — will focus on a pair of new anthologies, Best African American Essays 2009 and Best African American Fiction 2009, both published by Bantam Books.

Poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 2, for the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. Lehman is the author of several collections of poems, including Poetry Forum: A Play Poem: A Pl’em (with Judith Hall, 2007), Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins, 2006), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), Valentine Place (1996), Operation Memory (1990) and An Alternative to Speech (1986).