Arts & Culture

New conductor Horst Buchholz and new director of strings Amy Greenhalgh will make their debuts with the Washington University Symphony Orchestra Oct. 30. The concert will take place at The E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall in the 560 Music Center.

Cakes typically evoke birthday parties and celebrations. But a recent project by Ebony G. Patterson — a 2006 alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts — transformed the idea of the cake into something entirely more serious.

South Central Los Angeles, 1976. The lawns are manicured, the palm trees sway, the savings bonds are tucked optimistically away. But the Youth is restless. In “Passing Strange,” the singer and playwright Stew offers a semi-autobiographical account of his journey to artistic self-discovery. The Performing Arts Department will present the Tony Award-winning rock musical Oct. 21-30 in Edison Theatre.

Thousands of photographers, videographers and writers will descend on Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 9 to cover the presidential debate. But in mid-20th-century America, another sort of journalist was part of the media mix — the illustrator. The Douglas B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library features hundreds of images of politicians, the electoral process and American voters.

Mark Sparks, principal flute for the St. Louis Symphony, and pianist Peter Henderson will launch the Danforth University Center’s fall Chamber Music Series Sept. 27 with music of Max Bruch, Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.

St. Louis piano legend Ptah Williams will join Washington University in St. Louis guitarist William Lenihan and drummer Steve Davis to launch the fall Jazz at Holmes Series Thursday, Sept. 8.

Coloratura soprano Amy Owens will perform Richard Strauss’ notoriously difficult “Amor” Sept. 18 as part of Washington University’s annual Liederabend. Also on the program will be music of Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert, Antonin Dvořák and Carl Millöcker.

For all the advances of modern medicine, health-care architecture has long been guided by custom and intuition rather than research and testing. That’s changing, thanks to an emerging field known as evidence-based design, said Xiaobo Quan, director of Washington University’s newly formed Center for Health Research & Design.

A collection is not a static thing, a project to be finished. A collection lives and breathes and evolves over time. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum — one of the oldest university museums in the nation — will mark the 10th anniversary of its Fumihiko Maki-designed facility with an ambitious, building-wide installation. “Real / Radical / Psychological: The Collection on Display” steps back from a decade of thematic presentations and, for the first time, presents the esteemed permanent collection in chronological fashion.