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8) I am trying to choose between a conservatory and a liberal arts college. Will I find enough high-level performance activity at St. Mary's College of Maryland to prepare me for a career as a performer? Our track record with our performing graduates is a good one. Your experience in college studying music performance begins, of course, with your private lesson teacher. Our faculty is uniformly strong, with successful and active professionals teaching every instrument. Our ensembles play challenging repertoire, and because we are small, you will have a lot of opportunities to play, not only in the large groups, but also chamber music - and you will get the kind of personal attention impossible at a large school.Two of the most exciting parts of our program, though, are in the summer - and these set us apart dramatically from other small colleges. We begin each summer in Italy. Our performance program moves to Alba, in Northern Italy, to participate in the International Alba Music Festival. Concerts are given in the town's 400-seat performing arts center, numerous small churches, and in the auditorium of the Ferrero chocolate factory. Typically, we will give something like seventeen concerts in eleven days. The music festival is organized as a joint venture between the St. Mary's College and the Piemonte town of Alba, with students and faculty from St. Mary's College, plus featured artists and musicians from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The rest of the summer features our River Concert Series, a seven-concert series by the Chesapeake Orchestra, an excellent professional group with our teachers sitting in the principal chairs. The orchestra is put together based on the model for many festival orchestras, including the Aspen Festival Orchestra, where the players are at a professional or advanced level. The programming includes some of the most exciting and challenging of the orchestral repertoire: highlights of just the last two seasons include Mahler's First and Fifth Symphonies, Strauss's "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Thus Spake Zarathustra," Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, Bruch's Violin Concerto (with Lara St. John), Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Kenji Bunch’s “Hardware Concerto” (with the Ahn Trio), and many others. Our students, as appropriate, are hired to play in these concerts, giving them the opportunity both for summer employment and for a chance to play this repertoire at a high level in a situation where they sit at the side of their private lesson teacher. See the performance page for more information.
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