Music "Of Land and Water: Contemporary Chamber Works for Tenor, Horn and Piano"

Vocalist Peter W. Shea, hornist Jean Jeffries and pianist Susan Dedell perform a concert of contemporary vocal chamber music on the themes of land and water, on Saturday, June 13, at 7:30 p.m. at Buckley Recital Hall in the Arms Music Center at Amherst College. The concert is free and open to the public.

The featured work is the world premiere of “The Fish” by Amherst College emeritus professor Lew Spratlan, which sets to music Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same title. The trio also performs recently composed pieces by New England composers Paul Dedell, Lawrence Siegel and David Kidwell, and works from the 1950s by British composer Arnold Cooke. These include musical settings of poems by Carl Sandburg, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth, among others.

Shea, Jeffries and Dedell are well-known performers in western New England and beyond. Shea has been a soloist since the 1970s with numerous performing groups in the Connecticut River Valley, the Berkshires, and the Worcester and Albany areas. For the past 15 years he has given annual recitals of German lieder for the Amherst College German Department. Jean Jeffries teaches horn and coaches chamber music at Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges, and plays both modern and natural horn in several New England orchestras. Susan Dedell is active both as a pianist and as a conductor. She is director of music at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Brattleboro, Vt., and conducts the Brattleboro Concert Choir.