Whittington Competition Performance

The student winners of Birmingham-Southern College’s annual Dorsey and Frances Whittington Music Competition will perform with the Red Mountain Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, Feb. 28, at 3:00 p.m. in Munger Hall Auditorium on campus. The concert is free and open to the public.

The orchestra, conducted by BSC’s Joseph Hugh Thomas Professor of Music Lester Seigel, will present three classics: two of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, Ambroise Thomas’s Entr’acte-Gavotte from Mignon, and Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro.

Four music majors will be soloists in the program. Junior baritone Nick DeCastro of Baton Rouge, La., will sing “Hai gia vinta la causa” from The Marriage of Figaro; senior tubist Wesley Chambers of Atlanta will be soloist for Edward Gregson’s “Concerto for Tuba;” Brendan McInerney, a senior saxophonist from West Lafayette, Ind., will perform Paul Creston’s “Concerto for Alto Saxophone;” and Zoe Wirt, a sophomore from Columbus, Ga., will sing “Je suis Titania” by Ambroise Thomas, from his opera Mignon.

The 2015 Whittington Competition was held on campus Dec. 7. The judges were G. William Bugg, professor emeritus of music at Samford University; Kenneth Watson, music director at Mountain Chapel United Methodist Church; and Suzanne Beaudry, retired instructor at Alabama School of Fine Arts and president of the Red Mountain Chamber Orchestra.

The competition is named for Frances and Dorsey Whittington, seminal musical figures in Birmingham’s musical history and longtime faculty members of the former Birmingham Conservatory of Music, which later became BSC’s Music Department.