UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Brent Wissick (Class of 1978, master of music degree), the Penn State School of Music's 2014 Alumni Award recipient, will present a lecture-recital at 2:30 p.m. Friday, April 4, in 110 Music Building I. Wissick is the Zachary Taylor Smith Distinguished Term Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he has taught cello, viola da gamba and chamber music since 1982. The title of his presentation is "Death in Moscow: Britten's Third Cello Suite, Rostropovich, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and the Opera 'Death in Venice.'" Admission is free.
The College of Arts and Architecture's alumni awards are designed to recognize outstanding accomplishments of Penn State alumni, and also to connect prominent alumni with current students and faculty.
Wissick is a member of Ensemble Chanterelle and principal of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra. He is also a frequent guest with American Bach Soloists, Folger Consort, Boston Early Music Festival, Concert Royal, Dallas Bach Society, Vancouver Early Music Festival and Collegio di Musica Sacra in Poland. With these ensembles, he has recorded for the Centaur, Albany, Koch, Radio Bremen, Bard and Dux labels as well as in the soundtrack for the Touchstone film "Casanova." His online video article, "The Cello Music of Bononcini" can be viewed in the peer-reviewed Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and several of his teaching videos are posted on the website of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. He served as president of that society from 2000-04, and chaired its international Pan-Pacific Gamba Gathering in Hawaii during the summer of 2007.
In addition to teaching cello at UNC, he directs its Cello Choir, Viol Consort and Baroque Ensemble. He also teaches classes in historical performance practice and string methods for music education students as well as a first-year seminar in the physics of music with the chair of the Physics Department. He has served as mentor of the Kenan Music Scholars and is chair of the string area.
His current research and performance interests include the cello music of Benjamin Britten, Chopin’s cello music on period instruments and French gamba music. A graduate of the Crane School of Music at Potsdam College in New York and of Penn State, he also studied with John Hsu at Cornell University and was an National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard in the 1993 Beethoven Quartet Seminar. He has taught at the College of St. Scholastica in Minnesota (1978-82), Chautauqua Institution and the 1997 Aston Magna Academy at Yale. In addition, he has presented lectures, masterclasses and recitals at schools, colleges and workshops throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.