Appendicitis forces cancellation of concert

Parker String Quartet

A concert at Bates College by fortepianist Andreas Staier, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, has been canceled due to illness.

Staier, a German citizen, was treated for appendicitis in Germany on Oct. 12. The college hopes to reschedule the concert during the current academic year, said Seth Warner, manager of the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall at Bates.

But the weekend’s other classical concert will go on as planned. The Parker Quartet becomes a fivesome when Warner, who is also a guitarist, sits in for a performance of Boccherini’s “Fandango” Quintet for guitar and strings in a 7:30 p.m. program on Saturday, Oct. 17, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Tickets, at $12 for general admission and $6 for seniors and students, are available at www.batestickets.com. (One hundred free tickets will be available at the door to Bates students on a first-come, first-served basis.) For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

The program also includes music by Haydn and Mendelssohn.

The Parker Quartet has been called “something extraordinary” by The New York Times. The Boston Globe hailed its “fiercely committed performances” and The Washington Post declared it “a quartet that deserves close attention.”

The quartet’s awards include first prizes at the 2005 Concert Artists Guild Competition and the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition. They have performed in such series as Lincoln Center’s Great Performers, the Wolf Trap Discovery Series and Ravinia’s Rising Stars; and at such venues as Jordan Hall and Gardner Museum in Boston, and in New York’s Symphony Space and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Warner, concert hall manager at Bates, is a multi-instrumentalist whose performances on guitar and lute were described as “ethereal” by the Portland Press Herald. On the Boccherini, he will play a reproduction of a 19th-century guitar by Viennese luthier Johann Anton Stauffer.