Cellist opens OBU’s Fall Artist Series

Noted young cellist Clancy Newman will be in concert for the first of Oklahoma Baptist University's Fall Artist Series events, Sept. 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the university's Yarborough Auditorium.

OBU's Warren M. Angell College of Fine Arts will host four artists in September, including Newman, Leonardo da Vinci expert and lecturer Bulent Atalay Sept. 19, clarinetist Chris Bade Sept. 24 and colonial musicians David and Ginger Hildebrand Sept. 30.

Newman is best known for winning the coveted first prize of the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Competition in 2001, which includes a recital at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Newman has one numerous awards and has been featured as a soloist with orchestras across the world.

He will be accompanied by pianist David Allen Wehr. The two have performed as a duo since the 1999 National Federation of Music Clubs Convention in St. Louis.

The program will include Beethoven's "Variations on 'Bei Mannern'" from Mozart's "Magic Flute", Shostakovich's "Sonata, op. 40," Chopin's "Sonata in G Minor, op. 65," and Astor Piazzolla's "Grand Tango."

Newman has won first prizes at the National Symphony Orchestra Young Soloists Competition, The Juilliard School Cello Competition, the National Society for Arts and Letters Cello Competition. He also won the Arts and Letters Competition in Brisbane, and the National Federation of Music Clubs Competition, which provided two years of concert engagements throughout the United States.

He has appeared as soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., the Juilliard Orchestra in Avery Fisher Hall, the Juilliard Pre-College Symphony in the Juilliard Theater, and the Longwood Symphony in Boston's Jordan Hall.

He became affiliated with Astral Artistic Services when he won the 2000 auditions and became the first Astral artist presented in recital in Philadelphia's recently inaugurated Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

A native of Albany New York, Newman received his first significant public recognition at age 12 when he won the Gold Medal for Strings at the Dandenong Youth Festival in Australia, competing against instrumentalists twice his age. He developed an interest in composition at an early age, an activity to which he still devotes much of his time.

Newman has attended the Sydney Conservatorium in Australia, the Taos School of Music, the Verbier Academy in Switzerland, and the Piatigorsky Seminar. He participated in several seasons of the Marlboro Music Festival and toured as a part of the "Musicians from Marlboro" series.

His teachers included David Gibson, Joel Krosnick and Harvey Shapiro.

He holds an undergraduate and master's degree in music from Juilliard and became one of the first students to complete the five-year exchange program between Juilliard and Columbia University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in English.

Wehr is Hillman distinguished professor of piano at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Penn. This season, he will record and perform the complete Beethoven Sonata Cycle at the university. He was artist-in-residence at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas from 1994-2002.

This concert is presented under the auspices of the Naumburg Foundation. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the program in the Helen Thames Raley Drawing Room.

For more information, contact OBU's College of Fine Arts at (405) 878-2305 or visit www2.okbu.edu.