Dance and song come together in two upcoming performances at Bates’ Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

The remarkable dancer-choreographer-singer Janis Brenner offers a solo performance in Olin at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 17. Brenner explores the passion, humor, depth and emotional power of our relationships to others, to ourselves and to the world around us. The New York Times described Brenner’s dances as filled with “free-wheeling motion and rooted emotional intensity.”

Her Bates performance includes a vocal suite by Meredith Monk and “Solo For Janis” by Richard Siegal. This performance is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required.

The following week, the 2008-09 Bates College Concert Series continues with a performance by the tango troupe called Pablo Aslan’s Avantango at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 26, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

New York-based Avantango, led by bassist Aslan, comprises six musicians and four dancers, plus a guest singer, all Argentine natives. Mixing the legendary music of Astor Piazzolla with contemporary themes and rhythms, the ensemble reclaims the tango as a living tradition, while incorporating jazz improvisation and turning historic cliches upside down.

A New York Daily News critic wrote that Avantango “uncovered a colorful, bristling range of musical possibilities . . . harnessing jazz improvisation to take off in some suggestive, fascinating musical directions.” Avantango members have toured with such artists as Shakira, Yo Yo Ma and Julio Iglesias, and appeared in the National Geographic television special “Tango!” narrated by Robert Duvall.

Bates Concert Series performances take place at 8 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Tickets are $10 general admission and $4 for students and seniors, and are available at www.batestickets.com. For reservations and more information, please call 207-786-6135, visit the concert series Web site or olinarts@bates.edu.

Featuring a lively blend of jazz, Latin and classical music, the college’s flagship series of musical events resumes during the winter with the renowned guitarists known as the Assad Brothers (Jan. 31) and finally, Germany’s Auryn Quartet in a two-evening stand that begins the group’s multi-year presentation of the complete Beethoven string quartets at Bates (Feb. 5-6).

– Office of Communications and Media Relations

Up next in the Bates College Concert Series are acclaimed opera singers Kelly Kaduce, soprano, and Lee Gregory, baritone, performing at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The couple are award-winning rising stars in opera and are in demand on concert and recital stages throughout the United States. Their Bates program includes works by Granados, Debussy and Grieg, as well as operatic arias and duets.

Admission is $10 for adults and $3 for students. For reservations and more information, please call 207-786-6135 or visit the concert series Web site.

Kaduce is celebrated for her acting ability as well as her elegant, seemingly effortless singing. She has sung leading roles nationwide and in Europe, and also performs in recital and orchestral concerts.

For her creation of the title role in David Carlson’s “Anna Karenina,” which premiered in 2006, Opera News proclaimed Kaduce “an exceptional actress whose performance was as finely modulated dramatically as it was musically. . . . her dark, focused sound was lusty and lyrical one moment, tender and floating the next.” Also last year, Kaduce won rave reviews for her Boston Lyric Opera debut, in the title role of Massenet’s “Thaïs.”

Lee Gregory is a gifted actor and singer with a beautiful, warm and ringing voice. Boasting a wide and varied repertoire, he is known for his ability to inhabit his characters. Opera News praised his Mercutio in Nashville Opera’s “Roméo et Juliette” as “nearly ideal.”

Gregory’s recent performing highlights include his New York City Opera debut as Moralès in “Carmen” and his multiple roles in the Boston Midsummer Opera’s production “The Marriages of Mozart.” A regular performer with American Opera projects, Gregory has collaborated with new playwrights and composers. He added to his musical theater credits with a gala concert with the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra celebrating Richard Rodgers’ centenary.

The Bates College Concert Series concludes on March 1 with the popular American roots band The Holmes Brothers.

- Office of Communications and Media Relations

The 2006-07 Bates College Concert Series resumes at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 3, with a program of jazz by the Marcus Roberts Trio. The series concludes at 8 p.m. Friday, March 9, with an all-Schubert program performed by fortepianist Steven Lubin and baritone Thomas Meglioranza.

Both concerts take place in the college’s Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. Admission for the Roberts concert is $15 and for the Schubert program, $5. For more information, click here. For reservations, please call 207-786-6135.

Marcus Roberts is a pianist and composer widely celebrated for giving new and vital interpretations to historical jazz styles. A player who attained prominence as a member of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’ band, Roberts has dedicated himself to the seminal music of such greats as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton. He has also recorded concert music by Gershwin, James P. Johnson and Scott Joplin.

Roberts was the first jazz player to have his first three recordings reach No. 1 on Billboard’s traditional jazz chart. He has been honored with awards from the National Association of Jazz Educators and the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Blind since age 5, he received the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement in 1998.

Completing the trio are drummer Jason Marsalis, a member of the highly musical Marsalis family, and bassist Roland Guerin, a versatile musician who is one of the few jazz bassists using the “slap” technique.

Fortepianist Steven Lubin and baritone Thomas Meglioranza present an all-Schubert concert at 8 p.m. Friday, March 9. The program includes the “Schwanengesang” song cycle, the A-major Piano Sonata and some of Schubert’s best-loved lieder. Admission is $5.

Praised for “vocal distinction and expressive warmth” (The Boston Globe), Thomas Meglioranza is one of the country’s most sought-after young singers. He is known for compelling artistry and a remarkably versatile voice equally at home with Monteverdi, Schubert, Babbitt or Gershwin.

In March 2006, he was featured in a New York performance titled Twin Spirits: The Words and Music of Robert and Clara Schumann, starring rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler. Meglioranza starred in the North American premiere of Peter Eötvös’ operatic adaptation of “Angels in America” with Opera Boston, and other recent dates include debuts with the MET Chamber Ensemble with James Levine.

Lubin has appeared as soloist in many of the world’s great concert halls and in major international festivals. As a fortepianist, Lubin has been a dominating figure for more than two decades. In New York, starting in the late 1970s, he pioneered a series of fortepiano recitals and concerto performances of Mozart in period style, as soloist-conductor.

Among his 20 CDs, his recordings of Mozart concertos for Arabesque introduced many listeners to period-style performance of this repertoire. He was chosen by Decca to record the five piano concertos of Beethoven with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, a recording cited as definitive.

This weekend, the Bates College Orchestra, a string quartet from Italy and a Chekhov drama in a new translation promise ample distraction from the Endless Winter of 2005.

Starting at 8 p.m. Friday and running through March 19, the theater department presents six weekend performances of Anton Chekhov’s tragicomic play The Three Sisters in the world stage premiere of a translation by Laurence Senelick, professor of drama at Tufts University. The site is Schaeffer Theatre and admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for seniors and non-Bates students.

Same date, same time, the Bates College Concert Series ends its season with a program of Italian music by Quartetto di Venezia, a string quartet acclaimed for a distinctively Italian style that one reviewer described as “fresh and brilliant.” Admission to the concert, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, costs $8 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and non-Bates students with ID.

Finally, in his last performance with the Bates College Orchestra, Philip Carlsen conducts the ensemble in music by Haydn, Wagner and Copland at 8 p.m. Saturday. The concert features Amy Saffer ’05 as soloist in Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 1 in D major. The concert, also in the Olin concert hall, is open to the public at no cost.

Published in 1901, The Three Sisters is the story of three sisters and a brother, members of the privileged class, stuck in a provincial backwater and pining for the excitements of Moscow. “This is a play that’s always relevant to the way things are,” says Martin Andrucki, director of the theater department production and Dana Professor of Theater.

“It inhabits that space between hope and despair where most people spend most of their lives. Everyone in the play is longing for fulfillment, and everyone discovers the inevitability of loss and compromise.”

Recipient of a variety of awards for scholarly work in theater, Senelick is also the author of The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The translation that Bates is premiering was among five Senelick renderings of Chekhov plays published last fall in a W.W. Norton collection, Anton Chekhov’s Selected Plays.

Performances will be held at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, March 11-12 and 18-19, and 2 p.m. Sundays, March 13 and 20. For reservations and more information, please call the box office at 207-786-6161.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary season in 2004-05, Quartetto di Venezia will perform music by Verdi, Boccherini and other Italian composers.

Meeting at a conservatory in Venice and influenced by the Quartetto Italiano and the Vegh Quartet, both well-known in Europe, the quartet forged an interpretive approach emphasizing the quality of sound and the individuality of each instrumental voice.

The quartet’s repertoire ranges from classicists such as Beethoven, Mozart and Boccherini to modernists like Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Gian Francesco Malipiero. They have performed throughout Italy and abroad, including the United States, Latin America, Japan and South Korea, and have recorded extensively.

For additional information about the series and Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, please see the series Web site. For reservations, please call 207-786-6135.

In addition to the Haydn concerto, Saturday’s program by the 35-member orchestra consists of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Carlsen, a composer well-known in Maine and beyond, resumes his full-time faculty position at the University of Maine at Farmington after this academic year. For the past two years he split his time between Farmington and Bates, and the year prior was at Bates full time.

Saffer, of Stow, Mass., is a psychology major. She has played with the Bates College Orchestra for four years and been principal horn for three, and has performed with the Androscoggin Valley Community Orchestra, Bates College Choir Orchestra and the Bates brass and woodwind quintets.

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday surprise for his wife, Cosima, and named it after their infant son. Having prepared the piece in secret, Wagner and his musicians first it performed as Cosima was waking up on Christmas morning in 1870. Intimate, calm and lyrical — an expression of the composer’s newfound domestic happiness — Siegfried Idyll is Wagner’s most popular orchestral piece.

With its highlight a theme adapted from the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” Copland’s Appalachian Spring also has idyllic connotations for many, symbolizing a kind of pastoral optimism that’s distinctly American. Subtitled “Ballet for Martha,” it was written to accompany a ballet by the choreographer Martha Graham and was first performed at the Library of Congress in 1944.

The Bates College Concert Series ends its 2002-03 season with a performance by the celebrated Brentano String Quartet, joined by Maine pianist Yuri Funahashi, at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 8, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Tickets are $7 for the general public and $5 for seniors, children and Bates students.

Funahashi and the quartet will perform Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, Op. 57. The quartet will play three fugues from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet and Dvorák’s String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 51, to complete the program.

The Brentano String Quartet became the inaugural quartet in residence at Princeton University in 1999, and has been in residence at New York University since 1995. Funahashi, a Wilton resident and adjunct professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, is known to Maine audiences for her performances at various festivals, as well as with the Maine Music Society and the Pane-Funahashi Piano Duo. She has performed nationally and has recorded with violinists Joseph Swenson and Arturo Delmoni.

As an ensemble or separately, the members of the Brentano String Quartet — violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory and cellist Nina Maria Lee — are also familiar in Maine due to appearances at the Portland Chamber Music Festival and the Mt. Desert Festival of Chamber Music. Since its inception in 1992, the quartet has been praised for technical brilliance, musical insight and stylistic elegance.

Within a single year, the ensemble received three major awards: the first Cleveland Quartet Award, the 1995 Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the 10th annual Martin E. Segal Award. In 1997 the quartet’s first appearance in Great Britain won the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for most outstanding chamber music debut.

The Brentano String Quartet has performed in major North American musical centers including Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pittsburgh’s Frick Museum, the Chamber Music Society of Detroit and the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, as well as at venues in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans and Boston. The group has appeared with pianist Mitsuko Uchida at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, at the Library of Congress and at Lincoln Center, and collaborated with Jessye Norman in her 1998 Carnegie Hall and 1999 Salzburg Festival recitals.

The quartet is named after Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars believe to have been Beethoven’s mysterious “Immortal Beloved,” to whom he wrote his famous love confession. The four maintain a strong interest in contemporary music and have had several works written for them, including the String Quartet No. 6 of Milton Babbitt, Chou Wen-chung’s Clouds and two quartets by Bruce Adolphe.

The 2001-02 Bates College Concert Series continues with a pair of performances by Trio Parole of the complete Mozart piano trios in two separate programs, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 15, and Sunday, Sept. 16, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Admission is $15 general admission and $10 for seniors and students. For tickets call 207-786-6252.

Founded in 1997, Trio Parole began playing public performances in 1998. Since then, the trio has appeared in Italy, Germany and France, featuring works by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Named after the three cities in which the members lived when the group met (PAris-ROme-LEipzig), and after the idea prevalent in the 18th century that music is to be presented as speech and chamber music as conversation, Trio Parole is composed of Philippe Couvert, violin; Andrea Fossa, cello; and fortepianist Zvi Meniker.

Born in Savoie, France, Couvert studied the violin at the Paris Conservatory with Jean Lenert. He has been concertmaster of the original instrument orchestra La Grande Ecurie at la Chambre du Roy under Jean-Claude Malgoire since 1986. In addition to playing in other ensembles such as La Petite Bande and Les Talens Lyriques, he teaches various master courses in Europe and has produced many recordings with his own ensemble, the Academie Sainte-Cecile.

Andrea Fossa was born in Rome. After completing his cello studies at the Florence Conservatory, he studied the baroque cello at the Schola Cantorum in Basel with Christophe Coin. Fossa plays in many original instrument ensembles under the direction of J.C. Malgoire, E. Garrido, S. Kuijcken and others, and teaches baroque cello and chamber music at the Palermo Conservatory.

Zvi Meniker was born in Moscow and raised in Israel. He began advanced musical studies at the age of 15 and has received diplomas with distinction from the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Zurich Academy of Music, studying with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Johann Sonnleitner prior to moving on to the United States to study with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University. Meniker taught harpsichord and performance practice at Duke University and is a regular member of the faculty at the annual Early Music Workshop in Jerusalem. He currently teaches harpsichord, fortepiano and performance practice at the Hannover Conservatory. Meniker has performed a program of Mozart on fortepiano and the Bach Goldberg Variations on harpsichord in earlier appearances at Bates, and will perform on the college’s replica of a Walter fortepiano of 1790, crafted by Rodney Regier of Freeport.

Internationally acclaimed pianist and Nonesuch recording artist Richard Goode will open the 2001-02 Bates College Concert Series with an interpretation of classical masterpieces at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 5, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. The concert is free and open to the public, with seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Other concerts in the series include a performance by Goode and his wife, violinist Marcia Weinfeld, at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 7, and a concert by the chamber ensemble, Trio Parole, featuring the complete Mozart piano trios in two separate programs at 8 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 15, and Sunday, Sept. 16. Tickets for these performances are $15 general admission and $10 for senior citizens and students. All performances will be held at the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall on the Bates College campus.

Specializing in adaptations from the works of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Mozart and others, Goode infuses his piano interpretations of such classical fare with energy and expressiveness. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Goode’s immersion in the music is total, to the point of singing lustily with it, and there were moments when it seemed as if he felt the instrument were inadequate to reach the emotive peaks he was seeking.” The Dallas Times Herald said, “Richard Goode may be the best pianist in America.”

A native of New York, Goode has studied with Elvira Szigeti, Claude Frank, Nadia Reisenberg of the Mannes College of Music and Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute. Along with Mitsuko Uchida, Goode serves as co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival.

Goode has performed throughout Europe, with regular appearances in Paris, London, Amsterdam and Vienna. Over the past few seasons, he has performed with a collection of the world’s most revered orchestras, including the Boston, Chicago, Deutsches and BBC symphony orchestras. The producer of more than two dozen recordings, Goode holds the distinction of being the first American-born pianist to record the entire collection of Beethoven sonatas, for which he received a 1994 Grammy Award nomination.

Weinfeld began studying the violin in her native Buffalo before studying with Philipp Naegele at Smith College, Broadus Erle at the Yale School of Music and Felix Galimir at the Mannes College of Music. Weinfeld performed in the National Arts Centre Orchestra and has also been a soloist with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler.

Each year, more than 25 musicians take the Musicians from Marlboro concerts across the country for what Time magazine has called “the most exciting chamber music in the United States.” Now in its 36th season, the touring program has introduced many of today’s leading solo and chamber music artists to American audiences, including pianists Richard Goode, Murray Perahia and Andras Schiff; violinists Pamela Frank, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin and Shlomo Mintz; flutists Paula cellists Nathanial Rosen, Leslie Parnas and Peter Wiley; clarinetist Richard Stolzman; soprano Benita Velente; and baritone Sanford Sylvan. The New York Times has called the group “a trademark that guarantees a product of the highest quality.”

The Musicians from Marlboro is a community of musicians who come together every year for seven weeks in the Green Mountains of Vermont to exchange ideas and explore chamber music. It is a retreat where exceptional young professionals make music side by side with veteran, or “senior” artists.

One of those credited with founding the school is Adolph Busch, who came to America from Germany in the 1930s at the dawn of the Nazi era. Busch, with his brother Herman, his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin and others, hoped to create an environment in which the love of music was paramount.

Serkin, the man most closely associated with Marlboro’s development after Busch’s death in 1952, called Marlboro “a republic of equals.” Cellist Pablo Casals, who conducted at the festival from 1962 until his death in 1973, referred to it as a “temple of music.”

Each season exceptional senior and younger composers are invited to Marlboro through its composer-in-residence program creating an invaluable learning environment for Marlboro’s participants. Keeping with the tradition of presenting a broad sampling of musical works explored at Marlboro’s summer program, Musicians from Marlboro touring groups perform works by their composers-in-residence. Leon Kirchner’s Piano Trio No. 1, performed at Marlboro in 1997, is slated for this year’s tour.

Other series concerts are Peter Surasena and the Kandyan Dancers at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25 in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall; the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall; the Musicians from Marlboro at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 26, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall; jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris and pianist Jackie Terrason at 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 4, in the Lewiston Middle School Auditorium; and the Skampa Quartet at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 29, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

Touted by The New York Times as a “violinist of great control, improvisational flexibility and wide range,” Regina Carter is one of the most significant, versatile and innovative violinists to emerge on the jazz scene in decades. A consummate artist and virtuoso, Carter collaborated with artists as diverse as Wynton Marsalis, Lauryn Hill, Cassandra Wilson, Oliver Lake, Max Roach, Mary J. Blige, Aretha Franklin, Steve Turre, Billy Joel and Dolly Parton. The Washington Times described her violin as “laughing, crying and screaming.”

Carter has won acclaim for her solos on Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” tour and Wilson’s recent “Travelin’ Miles” concert at New York’s Lincoln Center. Her contribution to the “Miles” concert prompted The New York Times to call Carter “enormously gifted, bringing a blues sensibility to her improvisations.”

A Detroit native, Carter joins her hometown’s long line of famed musicians. A Suzuki alumna, she honed her skills as a member of the Detroit Civic Symphony Orchestra and on the bandstand under the tutelage of trumpeter Marcus Belgrave and organist Lymon Woodard. She also performed with the pop/funk band Brainstorm and the celebrated all-female Detroit collaborative Straight Ahead.

A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and Oakland University, Carter relocated to New York in the early 1990s, where she quickly became a vital member of the music scene, collaborating with Oliver Lake, the String Trio of New York and others.

She recorded a 1995 self-titled CD for Atlantic Records and in 1997′s “Something for Grace,” named for her mother, helped secure her first place in the violin category in Down Beat magazine’s 46th Annual Critics Poll. Carter’s Verve Record debut, “Rhythms of the Heart” (1999), integrates jazz, funk, African, Brazilian and soul music with an adventurous rhythmic sensibility.