Chamber series features clarinet player Sam Kaestner
West Point Staff Sgt. Sam Kaestner will perform a recital of music for clarinet. The free performance will be at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 16, in the West Point Jewish Chapel. The program will consist of music for the clarinet and bass clarinet alone, for two clarinets, and for clarinet and trombone. The program will include music by American composers Libby Larsen, Evan Chambers, and Charles Small, as well as J. S. Bach and Francis Poulenc. Larsen composed Yellow Jersey for two clarinets in 2004, during the year between Lance Armstrong’s fifth and sixth victories in the Tour de France. It was commissioned by the students of Dr. Alan Woy, the clarinet professor at the Crane School of Music, as a retirement gift. Sgt. First Class John Parrette will join Kaestner for this work. Small’s Conversation, composed for himself and bass trombonist David Taylor, has become a popular duet for tenor and bass trombone since its premiere in 1976. The piece was conceived as a conversation over a picket fence between two neighbors in their backyards. Alternating between the amiable and friendly, to violent and hostile, the changing styles have intertwining threads. Kate White will play the tenor trombone part, and Kaestner will play the bass trombone part on bass clarinet. Staff Sgt. Sam Kaestner was born in 1978 in Richmond, Va., and began studying clarinet at age nine. At age 15, he began private studies under clarinetist Marta Weldon of the Richmond Symphony. At the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, he received instruction from Edward Palanker, Baltimore Symphony bass clarinetist, and Anthony Gigliotti, former Philadelphia Orchestra principal clarinetist. He graduated in 2000. Kaestner then went to Northwestern University, where he studied with J. Lawrie Bloom, Chicago Symphony bass clarinetist, and graduated in 2002 with an honors masters degree. Allow extra travel time for vehicle and photo identification inspection. For more information, call the 24-hour hotline 938-2617; or visit www.usma.edu/band.