Guitars, Pianos, Strings and Winds Play Nicely With Others

If you like intimate musical performances, you’ll enjoy An Evening of Chamber Music at the Valley Performing Arts Center on Tuesday night, featuring guitar, piano, string and wind chamber groups.

On the program will be the Reinecke Horn Trio, Saint-Saens’ Tarantella, Choros by Villa-Lobos, Mozart’s Divertimento No. 3, Beethoven’s Trio, Op. 11, Scott McAllister’s Devil Sticks and the Mendelssohn Scherzo. These works will be performed by chamber music groups from the music department at Cal State Northridge under the direction of Dr. Julia Heinen, a solo clarinetist and chamber musician of world renown.

The CSUN Guitar Quartet, directed by Steve Thachuk, has been an ongoing student ensemble for more than 28 years, performing on and off campus. The quartet has performed for films, video productions, music festivals and in international competitions. It was recently hired to perform the guitar quartet music of Laurindo Almeida for a documentary on the life of the composer-performer, sponsored by the Brazilian government.

Piano, string and wind players will display the skills developed in their chamber music classes. Many students rehearse in various small groups in a wide variety of instrument combinations, from brass quintets and flute-oboe-piano trios to saxophone duets and tuba quartets.

The program will be presented in the Cypress Recital Hall at the campus' Valley Performing Arts Center. Opened in late January, the center is a magnificent, 166,000-square-foot complex that includes a 1,700-seat, multipurpose hall designed for concerts, operas, dance, Broadway shows and films, a 178-seat black box theater, classrooms, a 230-seat lecture room, rehearsal and events space and a new broadcast facility for campus radio station KCSN.

An Evening of Chamber Music, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Valley Performing Arts Center’s Cypress Recital Hall at Cal State Northridge. For tickets and information, call the Associated Students Ticket Office at 818-677-2488.