In collaboration with Dracut Arts, the Middlesex Community College music department will host an Online Saturday Arts Concert as part of the “A World of Music” Spring 2025 concert series. Featuring MCC faculty members, alumni and students, the concert will debut at 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 8.

“We are delighted to be collaborating with Dracut Arts to present another online concert in their Arts Saturday series,” said Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta, MCC’s Chair of Music. “It was a great experience to put this together with my colleagues Raley Beggs and Daniel Fridley and the wonderful alumni and students who came to record their performances at the MCC Academic Arts Center, Recital Hall at the end of last semester. We are grateful to the MCC Media Production team who recorded and edited the video and to Orlando Cela and his sound recording student Lucas Guerrero, who did the audio recording and editing.”

The concert will feature MCC faculty members Rodríguez-Peralta, pianist; Beggs, guitarist; and Fridley, bass. MCC alumni include Sarah Kiel, Baroque violin and violin; Anthony Lumenello, pianist; and Lucas Vaudo, baritone. The performing MCC students are Lila Ablimit, pianist; Navarre Williams, guitarist; and members of the MCC Guitar Ensemble.

“I am grateful I had the experience of learning this bright Mozart duet with Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta – it's the first duet I have played in years,” Ablimit said. “Rehearsing this piece together enabled me to learn more closely from her technique than ever before and gain more confidence in performing publicly. The performance was a cathartic and celebratory closing to the wonderful year I spent studying at MCC.”

“The performance [with the MCC guitar ensemble] was very fun,” said Taye Olasedidun, an MCC student. “We played ‘Autumn Leaves’ and freestyled a little bit. Then, I introduced the group to the audience. I really enjoyed the performance and had a great time doing it.”

Short works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Kaspar Mertz, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Stefano Donaudy, Leo Brouwer, Johann Sebastian Bach, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Carl Loewe, Alberto Ginastera, and Joseph Kosma will be featured.

“I really enjoyed my time at MCC studying classical repertoire with Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta,” Lumenello said. “My first semester we started with the most basic pieces by Bach, and it was a great journey working up toward Bach's set of 48 transcendental polyphonic etudes, otherwise known as the Well-Tempered-Clavier.”

“MCC's music program really helped to prepare me for my undergraduate and graduate violin performance studies at Longy School of Music of Bard College,” Kiel said. “It was such a wonderful experience to return to MCC as an alum to record two works on both modern and Baroque violin for this online concert. The recording team made it such an enjoyable process, and it was wonderful to collaborate with Professor Peralta again.”

Register for the concert at Dracut Arts!

Additional “A World of Music” performances include a Piano Recital by Anastasia Seifetdinova at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 4; Guqin and Viola in Musical Dialogue at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 11; and a Student Recital at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, April 28 at MCC’s Concert Hall on the Bedford Campus.

MCC will also host concerts at the Richard and Nancy Donahue Family Academic Arts Center in Lowell, including the Lowell Chamber Orchestra (LCO) at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 26 and Know Orchestra at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 23. The LCO kicked off the Spring season with a performance on Saturday, February 1.

All concerts are free and open to the public. Learn more about MCC's "A World of Music" concert series!