Trio les Amis opens 2015-16 concert season at Bates

Trio les Amis, a piano trio drawn from Maine’s three selective liberal arts colleges, performs music by Schumann, Brahms and Maine composer William Matthews at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is free but tickets are required, available at bit.ly/oacbates. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The trio is violinist Mary Hunter of Bowdoin College, pianist James Parakilas of Bates and cellist Steve Witkin of the Colby College Orchestra.

The program consists of Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 110; Johannes Brahms’ Piano Trio in B-flat (an authorized arrangement of his Op. 18 String Sextet); and a new solo piano piece by Matthews of the Bates faculty: “Diptych for Frank Glazer (1915-2015),” a tribute to the late pianist and Bates artist-in-residence Glazer.

Parakilas is the James L. Moody, Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts of Bates. A music scholar as well as performing musician, he is the editor of the highly regarded musical-social history Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano (Yale University Press, 2000) and the author of the 2012 textbook The Story of Opera (W.W. Norton).

Hunter is a musicologist with interests in 18th-century opera, gender and music, music in film, and the history of performance. She is the author of The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (Princeton, 1999), which won the American Musicological Society’s Kinkeldey Prize.

Witkin has been the principal cellist with the Colby Symphony Orchestra since 1987. He has appeared as soloist with the Colby orchestra and performed in concerts throughout Maine. When not playing the cello, he is an ophthalmologist with Maine Eye Care Associates in Waterville.