With special guests Eliane Elias, Anat Cohen, Trio da Paz, Shelly Berg and the Frost School of Music's Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra

In the 1960s, Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim brought the bossa nova craze to the United States, and this infectious and sensuous sound soon became beloved throughout the world. We celebrate Jobim’s centennial and the jazz genres of Brazil—including bossa nova, samba and choro—with the Frost School of Music’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, Grammy Award-winning vocalist and pianist Eliane Elias, sensational clarinetist Anat Cohen and Brazilian jazz group Trio da Paz.

Let’s go to Brazil, Miami style!

Come see me perform with Armen Martirosyan at Newman Recital Hall, Frost School of Music in Coral Gables for his second Doctoral Recital! 7:30pm

Come see me perform as part of the Frost Wind Ensemble!

Celebrate Italy’s musical soul through works inspired by its operatic grandeur, cinematic brilliance, and popular traditions. Featuring passionate arias, memorable film scores, and lively street music, this concert offers a captivating tour of one of the world’s richest musical cultures.

Celebrate Italy’s musical soul through works inspired by its operatic grandeur, cinematic brilliance, and popular traditions. Featuring passionate arias, memorable film scores, and lively street music, this concert offers a captivating tour of one of the world’s richest musical cultures.

Come see me perform the music of Henry Mancini as a member of the HMI Big Band! Free!

See me perform as a member of the Frost Wind Ensemble!

Come see me perform with Take 6 as part of the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra!

Open to flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, and saxophone players of all
abilities. Spend the day working with FAU's woodwind faculty,
rehearse in a massed woodwind choir, and enjoy a free pizza lunch.

Come see me perform with Take 6 as part of the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra!

Come see me perform as a member of the Lynn Wind Ensemble!

Come see me perform as a member of the Frost Wind Ensemble for this year’s first concert, We are America!

Come experience the electrifying synergy of the Copeland Davis Trio partnering with our wonderful Symphonic Band. Along with Copeland’s tantalizing pops arrangements, the program includes jazz, popular, and patriotic Americana with a salute to military and law enforcement veterans.

Come experience the electrifying synergy of the Copeland Davis Trio partnering with our wonderful Symphonic Band. Along with Copeland’s tantalizing pops arrangements, the program includes jazz, popular, and patriotic Americana with a salute to military and law enforcement veterans.

Music expresses life. A uniquely personal musical voice is something AI cannot replicate. For this concert, the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra will perform music by composers from Stephen Guerra’s studio writing program. Each will share an impactful life experience expressed through their own musical prism.

Guitarist Matthew Cochran, hailed by Soundboard for his “commanding stage presence” and “inventive interpretation,” joins the Frost Wind Ensemble for the world premiere of Sean Hickey’s Congregate Settings and a new work by Donald Grantham.

From the Mediterranean to the Big Easy and far beyond, Berlioz, Satchmo, Grofé and countless more have portrayed the infectious joy, reverence, and drama of Carnival season. After Roman Carnival Overture, strut along with the saints, and fly down to Rio to dance the Carioca with Fred and Ginger. There’s a fine time to be had Way Down Yonder in New Orleans!

PUERTO RICO!

Get ready for a thrilling musical journey from Brahms to Broadway—full of passion, drama, and pure joy!

Don’t miss it—we’ll see you there!

Enjoy an evening of music for saxophone and piano with Armen Martirosyan on piano and myself on soprano and alto saxophones.

From the Mediterranean to the Big Easy and far beyond, Berlioz, Satchmo, Grofé and countless more have portrayed the infectious joy, reverence, and drama of Carnival season. After Roman Carnival Overture, strut along with the saints, and fly down to Rio to dance the Carioca with Fred and Ginger. There’s a fine time to be had Way Down Yonder in New Orleans!

First a bestseller, then a major movie, now a magical concert event: CineConcerts presents Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban™ in Concert. Experience the adventures of your favorite wizard all over again, set to the music of a live symphony orchestra. Get ready to encounter a Dementor™, ride the Knight Bus™ and discover just who Sirius Black™ really is.

All characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Publishing Rights © JKR.

First a bestseller, then a major movie, now a magical concert event: CineConcerts presents Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban™ in Concert. Experience the adventures of your favorite wizard all over again, set to the music of a live symphony orchestra. Get ready to encounter a Dementor™, ride the Knight Bus™ and discover just who Sirius Black™ really is.

All characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Publishing Rights © JKR.

I will be performing in the Henry Mancini Institute Jazz, accompanying Patti WIlliams in a tribute to Patrick Williams.

Overview

MW I – January 22 & 23
Borrowed and Blue
By David Amado

The opening concert of our 36th season explores music shaped by African and African American musical traditions—both borrowed and blue. Whether filtered through the salons of Paris or the soundstages of New York, the blues and jazz idioms that grew out of the Black experience have deeply influenced 20th-century concert music and continue to shape how composers around the world imagine musical voice and identity.

We begin with Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music, drawn from his 1928 Threepenny Opera—a sly, satirical, genre-bending collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht. The show was a sensation in Weimar-era Berlin, and its music—equal parts cabaret, jazz, and parody—brought the grit of street life into the theater with startling freshness. This orchestral suite, arranged in 1929 for wind ensemble and rhythm section, distills the show’s most iconic moments—among them the ever-sinister Mack the Knife—into a set that swings and snarls.

Weill’s bold fusion of classical and popular idioms finds a kindred spirit in George Gershwin. His Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935, was a radical synthesis of jazz, opera, and folk traditions—an ambitious attempt to tell an African American story on the grandest of musical stages. While its reception has been complex and not without criticism, its score remains a cornerstone of American music. Robert Russell Bennett’s Symphonic Picture gathers its most memorable tunes—from Summertime to It Ain’t Necessarily So—into a single, thrilling sweep.

Between these two trailblazers comes Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto, nicknamed the “Egyptian.” Written in 1896 during the composer’s travels along the Nile, the piece reflects Saint-Saëns’s lifelong fascination with exotic sounds and faraway landscapes. Though filtered through a distinctly French sensibility, the concerto incorporates elements drawn from Middle Eastern and North African melodies, creating a vibrant musical postcard from a time when the “Orient” was as much imagined as it was understood. Pianist Tao Lin joins us to perform this dazzling, colorful work.

Each piece on the program navigates the intersections of cultural influence and personal voice—raising musical questions about what it means to “borrow,” and what’s born of the blues.

Overview

MW I – January 22 & 23
Borrowed and Blue
By David Amado

The opening concert of our 36th season explores music shaped by African and African American musical traditions—both borrowed and blue. Whether filtered through the salons of Paris or the soundstages of New York, the blues and jazz idioms that grew out of the Black experience have deeply influenced 20th-century concert music and continue to shape how composers around the world imagine musical voice and identity.

We begin with Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music, drawn from his 1928 Threepenny Opera—a sly, satirical, genre-bending collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht. The show was a sensation in Weimar-era Berlin, and its music—equal parts cabaret, jazz, and parody—brought the grit of street life into the theater with startling freshness. This orchestral suite, arranged in 1929 for wind ensemble and rhythm section, distills the show’s most iconic moments—among them the ever-sinister Mack the Knife—into a set that swings and snarls.

Weill’s bold fusion of classical and popular idioms finds a kindred spirit in George Gershwin. His Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935, was a radical synthesis of jazz, opera, and folk traditions—an ambitious attempt to tell an African American story on the grandest of musical stages. While its reception has been complex and not without criticism, its score remains a cornerstone of American music. Robert Russell Bennett’s Symphonic Picture gathers its most memorable tunes—from Summertime to It Ain’t Necessarily So—into a single, thrilling sweep.

Between these two trailblazers comes Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto, nicknamed the “Egyptian.” Written in 1896 during the composer’s travels along the Nile, the piece reflects Saint-Saëns’s lifelong fascination with exotic sounds and faraway landscapes. Though filtered through a distinctly French sensibility, the concerto incorporates elements drawn from Middle Eastern and North African melodies, creating a vibrant musical postcard from a time when the “Orient” was as much imagined as it was understood. Pianist Tao Lin joins us to perform this dazzling, colorful work.

Each piece on the program navigates the intersections of cultural influence and personal voice—raising musical questions about what it means to “borrow,” and what’s born of the blues.

Overview

MW I – January 22 & 23
Borrowed and Blue
By David Amado

The opening concert of our 36th season explores music shaped by African and African American musical traditions—both borrowed and blue. Whether filtered through the salons of Paris or the soundstages of New York, the blues and jazz idioms that grew out of the Black experience have deeply influenced 20th-century concert music and continue to shape how composers around the world imagine musical voice and identity.

We begin with Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music, drawn from his 1928 Threepenny Opera—a sly, satirical, genre-bending collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht. The show was a sensation in Weimar-era Berlin, and its music—equal parts cabaret, jazz, and parody—brought the grit of street life into the theater with startling freshness. This orchestral suite, arranged in 1929 for wind ensemble and rhythm section, distills the show’s most iconic moments—among them the ever-sinister Mack the Knife—into a set that swings and snarls.

Weill’s bold fusion of classical and popular idioms finds a kindred spirit in George Gershwin. His Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935, was a radical synthesis of jazz, opera, and folk traditions—an ambitious attempt to tell an African American story on the grandest of musical stages. While its reception has been complex and not without criticism, its score remains a cornerstone of American music. Robert Russell Bennett’s Symphonic Picture gathers its most memorable tunes—from Summertime to It Ain’t Necessarily So—into a single, thrilling sweep.

Between these two trailblazers comes Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto, nicknamed the “Egyptian.” Written in 1896 during the composer’s travels along the Nile, the piece reflects Saint-Saëns’s lifelong fascination with exotic sounds and faraway landscapes. Though filtered through a distinctly French sensibility, the concerto incorporates elements drawn from Middle Eastern and North African melodies, creating a vibrant musical postcard from a time when the “Orient” was as much imagined as it was understood. Pianist Tao Lin joins us to perform this dazzling, colorful work.

Each piece on the program navigates the intersections of cultural influence and personal voice—raising musical questions about what it means to “borrow,” and what’s born of the blues.

Come see me perform Escapades by John Williams at the 2026 FMEA conference in Tampa with the FAU Wind Ensemble!

Come see me perform a lost work with Liz Ames!
After restoring and performing the work from manuscript, I’ve decided to present it this year at the Navy Symposium in its piano reduction form.

International Saxophone Symposium hosted by the US Navy Band

George Mason University,

Instrumental Room 4pm January 10th

Get ready for the most wonderful time of the year! Armen and Friends Holiday Extravaganza is almost here, and it's going to be an unforgettable evening packed with surprises, holiday cheer, and love! Secure your tickets now and join us on December 11 at 7 PM in Clarke Hall at the University of Miami. Can't wait to celebrate with you all!