Minnesota Music Teachers Association concert set for April 11

On Thursday evening, April 11, artistic ambassadors will perform a chamber music concert at Bemidji State University.

Charles Asch, Isabella Dawis, Hyun Jin Cho, Emily Feld and Franco Holder are undergraduate and graduate music students from Minnesota colleges chosen by audition in January to represent the Minnesota Music Teachers Association. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Thompson Recital Hall of Bemidji State’s Bangsberg Fine Arts Complex. Admission is free.

The concert also will feature music for cello and piano, soprano and piano and piano solo, by composers J. S. Bach, Chopin, Haydn, Franck, Scarlatti, Schumann, Debussy and Michael Head.

Charles Asch, originally from Milwaukee, Wis., is working towards a doctoral degree in music at the University of Minnesota. He received his master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music in 2011 and has a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.

Isabella Dawis is a vocal soprano and a National Merit Scholar studying piano performance at the University of Minnesota and voice at the Institute of Vocal Artistry in St. Paul. She has appeared in productions at the Minnesota Opera, the Guthrie Theater and the Children’s Theatre Company.

Hyun Jin Cho is a senior marketing major in the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. She has studied piano in Korea, attending art schools before she went to college. However, she had to give up playing due to physical problems with her fingers. Now healed, she again studies piano at the University of Minnesota.

Emily Feld, from Rosemount, Minn., is a sophomore in piano and voice at Concordia College-Moorhead. Feld attended the St. Olaf Piano Academy in 2010

Franco Holder received his bachelors degree in music from Indiana University in 2009, after which he joined the faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne as a collaborative pianist. He composes and conducts and currently works as organist and choir director at Crown of Glory Lutheran Church.

In addition to the concert at Bemidji State, the musicians also will perform at Bemidji’s Horace May Elementary School on April 10 and the Kelliher and Blackduck schools on Friday, April 12.

For more information please contact the BSU music department at (218) 755-2915.