A little night music

Students in seven chamber ensembles will showcase their talent at 7:30 tonight in the Texas Southmost College Arts Center in Brownsville.

“It’s a student chamber ensemble,” said Iliana Zendejas, a student assistant for the Patron of the Arts program. “So, it’s a bunch of little ensembles of students that are music majors.”

They will perform classical, Romantic and contemporary music.

The first ensemble (Yolanda Vidaña Renteria on the violin, Orlando Pedraza on the cello and Sergio Hernandez on guitar) will perform “The Grand Trio” by “Sinfonia Concertante” a piece written by Austrian composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, will be performed by Lee Carrera playing the viola; John Hunter, the double bass; and Ramses Avalos, Georgette Garcia, Rosa Galicia and Emalee Bravo will play the violin and Esmeralda Castellon Cruzon the viola in the third ensemble in a performance of “Suite para 4 violines,” a Romantic piece by Ladislav Gabrielli.

Carrera will play the viola and Jacqueline Guevara the piano for a performance of the “Viola Concerto” by self-taught German composer and multi-instrumentalist Georg Philipp Telemann.

“You have to work together, it’s not like a solo type of thing,” Zendejas said of the ensembles. “It’s a group effort and it really helps with, like, your people skills and really helps you be a better musician.”

“Da liegt der Feinde gestreckte Schar” (“There lie the enemies, strewn in piles”), by German composer and music critic Robert Schumann, will be performed by baritone Esdras Alvarado and Jose McKinnon on piano.

Alejandro Mejia and Daniel Camacho will perform a piano duet of “Take 5” by American jazz alto saxophonist and composer Paul Desmond.

Mezzo-soprano Lorna Lopez and pianist Rebekah Johnson will close the night with “Spring Song,” written by American modernist composer Charles Ives.

“I think that it’s important to go to these types of concerts because you get exposed to different music that you might otherwise not be exposed to,” Zendejas said.

General admission is $5 and free for Patron of the Arts members. The next student ensemble will be April 6.

For more information, call the Patron of the Arts office at 882-7025.