Every year, one of the great highlights of our performance season is the third Oakland Symphony Orchestra (OSO) Concert, the David Daniels Young Artists Concert, which features the winners of the Oakland Concerto Competition, which this year will be on Sunday, February 10, at 3 pm. Final decisions about who will be given the honor of performing are made by a panel of judges presided over by OSO conductor Gregory Cunningham. He says, "The concerto competition is always fiercely contested and we have to make a brutal choice. This year all of the finalists demonstrated great maturity, poise and artistry." The winners of this year's completion were announced on Friday, January 11, 2013. Selected were one piano student, Joe Walters; two instrumental students, Emily Hudock and Luke Perzyk; and two voice students, Nicolette Book and Chynna Roose.

We want to remind you of our ongoing Thursday Arts-After-Work Series with performances starting at 6 p.m. and a "pay what you wish" ticket price. On February 7, we have a very special offering that no dance lover should miss. Contemporary dance companies Shifting Sol and soduo will appear in Varner Recital Hall in an artistic exploration called Take Root, based on themes inspired by trees. Among the highlights will be a dance inspired by images of ancient yew trees which are visually stunning. The trees have interweaving branches that fracture. Those images reminded the choreographers of "tangled octopuses" and they have attempted to capture this idea in dance. In this multifaceted collaborative event, choreographers and OU dance professors Thayer Jonutz and Ali Woerner celebrate continuous growth and intricacy. Multimedia specialist Alvin Hill has composed a score of electronic music which creates an environment for the dancers to exist in physically.
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The brilliance of our theatre program was clearly showcased this year in our two fall semester productions, Police Deaf Near Far and Spring Awakening. These plays were bold choices and our students rose to the challenges they posed, as performers, and as technicians and designers. Both productions played to near capacity houses throughout their runs, and audiences made their appreciation clear. If any further demonstration of our theatre program's excellence was needed, it was found recently at January's Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Region III conference at Saginaw Valley State University, when, as Associate Professor Kerro Knox says, "OU was a major presence." Professor Knox is the Immediate Past Chair of Region III and he coordinated the region's Irene Ryan Auditions. 

"I'm endlessly curious about music," says Terry Herald, our technical director and audio guru. That curiosity has led him in many diverse directions, but those who know Terry only in his behind-the-scenes production capacity may be surprised by the scope of his career, especially since his original musical motivation was not unlike many other young teenage boys. Most of them went on to become everything from architects to zoo keepers. Terry recalls first being drawn to play a musical instrument when the Beatles invasion was in full swing and "all the girls were going crazy for Paul." He says, "I thought, I have to learn to play the guitar." He started at age 11 and by 16 was taking the subject very seriously and paying for his own lessons. When it came time for college he enrolled at Wayne State as a classical guitar performance major, switched to music theory in his sophomore year, and after finishing both his bachelor's and his master's degree, he began to teach at his alma mater.

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