Usdan Center For the Creative and Performing Arts (www.usdan.com), now entering its 43nd season and once again declared a "Best Of" class or camp for 2010 by TimeOutNY/Kids, will open its series of Festival Concerts, private on-site educational performances for its students, on Monday June 28 at the Center's 200-acre woodland campus. In addition to these concerts, special workshops and master classes will be offered by visiting guest artists throughout the summer.
The Center's 2010 season runs from June 28 to August 13. Usdan is located at 185 Colonial Springs Road, in Wheatley Heights (Huntington) Long Island.Usdan's daily concerts are presented every weekday at the Center's 1,000-seat McKinley Amphitheater. Concerts are presented at 12:00 Noon, and again at 12:30 PM. The artist concerts expose Usdan students to the best of music, dance and theatre while they are pursuing their studies in these fields. After severAl Weeks of attending these artist performances, students take over and perform onstage themselves. In addition, there are on-site exhibits displaying the work of visual arts students.This year's schedule of Festival Concerts opens Monday June 28 with the young violinist Rachel Lee, praised by the Chicago Tribune for her "big, luscious sound combined with dazzling dexterity," and honored last year with the Usdan Distinguished Young Artist Award. On succeeding days, performers include the world-renowned jazz singer and Usdan alumna Jane Monheit; Metropolitan Opera soprano Monica Yunus, a featured artist in this year's Metropolitan Opera Concerts In the Parks; the very specialized Swiss Alphorn Quartet, playing music for alpine instrument; legendary jazz stars Arturo O'Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Jimmy Heath, winner of a Usdan Lifetime Achievement Award; ABT star Ashley Tuttle, and Colt Prattes of the Broadway revival of West Side Story, dancing a new work by Maurice Brandon Curry, whose choreography is performed worldwide, and who is Chair of the Usdan Dance Department; jazz pianist Ted Rosenthal, a Thelonius Monk Competition-winner, with his Quartet; Quartet New Generation, the unique all-female recorder ensemble specializing in early and contemporary music; The Chameleons, the popular mime troupe; the Mark Stuart Dance Theatre, whose performance of Babalu with the Desi Arnaz Orchestra this year was called "Smoldering, exotic..the heat was on" by the New York Times; and singers and dancers TBA from current Broadway hits, in a specially created program, Voices Of Broadway.Videos