Andy Stewart and Mary Jo Slattery

The 2008 Bates College Midsummer Lakeside Concert Series continues with a performance by the eclectic American folk duo Slattery and Stewart…

Fiddler Andy Stewart and Mary Jo Slattery, a singer and multi-instrumentalist, represent roots traditions including the exuberant soulful two-steps and waltzes of Cajun Louisiana, the upbeat fiddle tunes of French Canada and New England, and the occasional mountain ballad. [More...]

• Thursday, July 31st, 6:00 p.m.
• Florence Keigwin Amphitheater

The Bates College Concert Series presents Gamelan Galak Tika, a Boston-area ensemble performing the gamelan music of Bali, Indonesia, in performance at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is $10 for adults and $3 for students. For reservations and more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu, or visit the concert series Web site.

Gamelan Galak Tika is the Boston area’s first and foremost Balinese gamelan. The group performs traditional and modern Balinese dance and music, and develops innovative works that cross borders and defy genres. “Gamelan” refers to the large bronze percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, Indonesia.

The orchestra creates an “intoxicating tone of wave-like rhythms and ringing sonorities,” wrote a reviewer for the Newark Star-Ledger, who called the experience “a cross-cultural, color-rich mix of mesmeric gamelan resonance and rock drama!”

The Bates concert features legendary Balinese dancer and scholar I Made Bandem, former head of Bali’s prestigious ISI Arts Academy and author of “Balinese Dance in Transition” (Oxford University Press, 1995). He will perform traditional dance solos and duos while accompanied by Galak Tika’s 25-member ensemble of gongs, metallophones, drums and flutes.

The program also includes Galak Tika’s first performance of Bali’s most famous female dance, “Legong Kraton.” (The performer was not determined at press time.) Also on the program are different genres of instrumental music, both ancient and modern, performed on a variety of hand-forged and intricately carved instruments.

Galak Tika was formed in 1993 and is led by composer Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. The words “galak tika” are classical Javanese for “intense togetherness.” The ensemble draws its members from the MIT community and functions in the tradition of a Balinese village “sekeha,” with decisions made communally and responsibilities shared among participants.

The ensemble has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at colleges in New England and New York. In summer 2005 Galak Tika toured Bali, bringing new American works to the Bali International Arts Festival as well as to villages throughout the island.

Its first Bates visit took place in 2004.

The Bates College Concert Series resumes in 2008 with acclaimed opera singers Kelly Kaduce, soprano, and Lee Gregory, baritone, on Saturday, Feb. 9; and the popular American roots band The Holmes Brothers on Saturday, March 1.

Beginning with a performance by Jon Nakamatsu, the only American gold medalist in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition since 1981, the 2002-2003 Bates College Concert Series is a connoisseur’s choice of jazz and classical players. Nakamatsu’s concert, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall opens a series that includes jazz trumpeter Tiger Okoshi, jazz guitarist Pat Martino and such classical artists as Maine pianists Frank Glazer and Yuri Funahashi, violinist Curtis Macomber and the renowned Brentano String Quartet.

All five concerts take place in the college’s Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. Admission to four of the concerts is $7 for adults and $5 for seniors. Admission to the Glazer-Macomber program on Nov. 9 is free, through the support of the Florence Pennell Gremley Fund at Bates.

Here’s a summary of the 2002-2003 Bates College Concert Series:

Jon Nakamatsu (7:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29): A California native and former high school German teacher, Jon Nakamatsu became the 10th Van Cliburn competition gold medalist in 1997. He records for the prestigious harmonia mundi usa label, and is a popular and critical favorite described by one reviewer as a “poet of the keyboard.”

Nakamatsu is equally comfortable in solo recital, chamber ensembles and as an orchestral soloist, and his repertoire runs from Bach through Beethoven to such contemporary composers as Lukas Foss. The program for his Maine debut includes works by Woelfl, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms.

Tiger Okoshi & Co. (8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5): Toru “Tiger” Okoshi took up trumpet as a teen-ager after hearing a concert in his native Japan by Louis Armstrong. After graduating summa cum laude from the Berklee College of Music, in Boston (where he is now an associate professor), he toured with such jazz greats as vibraphonist Gary Burton and drummer Buddy Rich. A JVC recording artist and clinician for Yamaha Corporation, Okoshi is known for such recordings as Color of Soil (1998), Two Sides to Every Story (1996) and 1993′s Echoes of a Note, a tribute to Armstrong.

Pianist Frank Glazer and violinist Curtis Macomber (8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9; free admission): Colleagues in the New England Piano Quartette, one of Maine’s best-loved chamber groups, Macomber and Glazer have performed together since the mid-1990s. For this concert, they will play three Beethoven sonatas.

A faculty member at Juilliard, Macomber belonged to the New World String Quartet from 1982 to 1993 and is a founding member of the Apollo Trio. He is an influential champion of new music whose CRI disc Songs of Solitude, a compilation of contemporary repertoire, was named one of the best solo instrumental recordings of 1996 by the New York Observer.

Maine’s best-known pianist and a resident artist at Bates, Glazer is an artist of international stature who taught at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, N.Y., before retiring to Maine with his wife, Ruth, in 1980. The couple founded the popular Saco River Festival, held in Cornish every summer. A student of pianist Artur Schnabel, Glazer is one of the few surviving proteges of that great musician. His long career has included numerous recordings, his own television program in the 1950s and countless solo recitals and performances.

Jazz guitarist Pat Martino (8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 18): Musical insiders know Martino from his larger-than-life technique, intrepid improvisations and a stylistic breadth that spans bop, R&B and funk. (He is also celebrated for his hard-fought recovery from a life-threatening brain aneurysm in the 1980s.) A veteran of three decades in jazz, Martino has made more than 20 albums and is currently signed with the esteemed Blue Note label. Pianist Gil Goldstein accompanies him in this appearance at Bates.

Brentano String Quartet with pianist Yuri Funahashi (8 p.m. Saturday, March 8): Founded in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet received three major awards within its first year and went on to become the first (and current) quartet-in-residence at Princeton University. The quartet has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center and other important venues. Distinguished by technical brilliance and musical insight, the group is equally convincing with the established repertoire and new music. The Bates program includes Bach, Webern and Dvorak.

Particularly acclaimed for her solo work and sonata recordings with violinists Joseph Swenson and Arturo Delmoni, Yuri Funahashi has performed in major concert settings around the world. In her adopted home state, where she is an adjunct professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, she is known for her performances at the Sebago-Long Lake Chamber Music Festival and with the Maine Music Society. For the Bates date, she joins the Brentano String Quartet for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, Op. 57.

For more information about the Bates Concert Series, please call 207-786-6135.

More that 40 years of concerts and numerous recordings have contributed to Seeger’s legendary status as a performer who weaves a lifetime of advocacy into a narrative that involves her audience as a partner. Accompanied by banjo, guitar, piano, concertina and autoharp, Seeger’s concerts include a cross section of ancient bloody ballads and finely crafted modern songs. She frames traditional Anglo-American tunes both by strong family immersion and more than a 30-year residency in England, where she became a leader in the British folksong revival.

“Born into one of America’s great musical families, she has grown into an institution of her own,” said the New Haven Advocate. The sister of folksingers Pete and Mike Seeger, the daughter of composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger and the mother of instrumentalists Neill and Calum MacColl, Peggy Seeger began her life as a musician at age 7 when she learned to play the piano.

After studying music at Radcliffe and traveling throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, she became a British subject in 1959 and settled in London with Ewan MacColl, the British dramatist-singer-songwriter, who composed “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for her. The Seeger-MacColl collaboration yielded a tapestry of field recordings of speech and sound effects melded with new songs in the folk idiom and complementary musical accompaniments.

One of the duo’s radio ballads, “Singing in the Rain,” took the 1960 Italia Prize for radio documentary. Their British folksong work incorporated folk techniques in film music and songwriting, emphasizing the connections between traditional artistic forms and political content.

For seven years, Seeger and MacColl ran the controversial London Critics Group, producing a yearly political theater piece The Festival of Fools and formed their own record company, Blackthorne Records. In addition to creating and editing a magazine of new songs, The New City Songster (1965-85), Seeger joined MacColl in offering concerts and workshops throughout the world.

Seeger has made 16 solo recordings and participated in 100 others. Often associated with her songs on nuclear disarmament and feminist issues, her best-known song “Gonna Be an Engineer,” is often invoked by women in their struggle for equal rights. From 1984 to 1994, Seeger worked with traditional Irish folksinger Irene Scott, touring together as No Spring Chickens and releasing Almost Commercially Viable through their company, Golden Eggs Productions. The BBC produced a five-part radio series about Seeger’s life in 1995-96.

Seeger moved to Asheville, N.C., in 1994 and published two songbooks, Peggy Seeger Songbook, Warts and All (Oak Publications, 1997) and The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook (Oak Publications, 1998). Her latest CD, An Odd Collection (Rounder, 1998), contains a collection of songs written solo and with Irene Scott. She continues to tour and sing throughout the United States and Great Britain.

The next concert in the Bates College Concert Series will be violinist Alisa Weilerstein, who will perform at 8 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Tickets for this concert are also $10 for general admission and $8 for students and seniors.

July 18, Casco Bay Concert Band, light classics and marches
July 25, Pacto Andino, Andean music
Aug. 1, Scott Steinberg, jazz and pop piano and vocals
Aug. 8, Suzanne & The Guys With Ties, a cappella jazz and pop
Aug. 15, Scrod Pudding, traditional dance music from New England, French Canada and Appalachia