CU at the Dairy: New partnership launches Sept. 7

A new cross-town collaboration is giving College of Music faculty an opportunity to broaden their horizons and share their art with the greater Boulder community.

This fall, the Dairy Arts Center and the College of Music launch CU at the Dairy. The new performance series features CU Boulder music faculty in concert at the Dairy’s Gordon Gamm Theater. The venue offers different ways for faculty performers to explore their craft, collaborate with other local artists and engage with audiences.

“The amazing faculty at CU have such great ideas and projects they want to present,” says Sharon Park, Dairy Center music curator and 2017 doctoral graduate of the College of Music. “The Gordon gives them an intimate venue to pair visual art, silent film, dance or any other art form with music.”

The series kicks off Sept. 7 with “Miraculous Mozart,” an evening with Helen and Peter Weil Professor of Piano David Korevaar. Assistant Professor of Violin Charles Wetherbee and other College of Music faculty and alumni will join Korevaar on stage for Mozart’s 14th and 15th piano concertos as the audience gets a bird’s-eye view of the open piano.

“This is an opportunity to bring to Boulder something I’ve only done abroad, which is conducting and playing with a chamber orchestra,” Korevaar says. “I’m excited to be a part of the first CU at the Dairy event; it’s fun to see the Dairy ‘growing up’ and taking its place as a performing arts venue in our town. I also hope this introduces more people to the excellence at the College of Music.”

Then, on Sept. 15, Associate Professor of Theory Yonatan Malin hosts a multimedia event in collaboration with the college’s violin studios and CU’s Program in Jewish Studies and International Film Series. “The Yellow Ticket” features a rare 1918 silent film about a young Jewish woman studying medicine in Tsarist Russia. Klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and jazz pianist Marilyn Lerner perform the original score live, and Malin leads a panel discussion with the performers and CU faculty members about film, music and cultural awareness.

“The partnership with the Dairy is perfect for the screening of ‘The Yellow Ticket’ because it is of interest to CU students and faculty and the community at large,” Malin explains. “This project is already a partnership between the College of Music, the Program in Jewish Studies and the International Film Series at CU Boulder, so making it widely available and accessible for community members makes perfect sense.”

For the College of Music, these first two events are only the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Says Dean Robert Shay, “It’s my belief that such collaborations strengthen all partners and generally help raise the visibility for the arts in our community. In a sense, we’re all in this together, working to find new audiences for what we do.”

“The arts have this power to engage people in important conversations, find an outlet to escape reality and even heal,” Park adds. “By building this bridge between the university and the community, we are helping create a ripple effect of awareness of the role music plays in our society.”

The series will continue with a performance by Thompson Jazz Studies Director John Gunther and friends in the spring. For more information about CU at the Dairy and to purchase tickets, call the Dairy Center box office at 303-444-7328 or visit the Dairy Center’s website.