The concert by pianist James Parakilas, violinist Mary Hunter and cellist Steve Witkin is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Parakilas chairs the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music department. A piano student of Robert Miller, John Kirkpatrick and Leonard Seeber, he has given solo and chamber performances throughout Maine, including in the clarinet-violin-piano trio Penumbra and with the dancers Carol Dilley and Jill Eng.

Parakilas has also performed as soloist with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra, and coaches chamber music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. He is the editor of the acclaimed social history “Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano” (Yale University Press, 2000).

Hunter chairs the music department and coaches chamber musicians at Bowdoin. She studied violin at the Guildhall School of Music in London, and more recently with Rowan Smith and Eva Gruesser. She is a member of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra.

Witkin is principal cellist with the Colby College Symphony Orchestra and former principal cellist of the Bach Chamber Orchestra of Milwaukee. He plays frequently throughout Maine, and has performed in orchestras and at chamber music recitals in Florida, New York and Italy. He studied with Kermit Moore, David Soyer, Lowell Creitz and George Sopkin. He is an ophthalmologist with Maine Eye Care Associates in Waterville.

Conducted by Hiroya Miura, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. Admission is free, but tickets are required. For more information contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

The orchestra will play Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D major, the composer’s last symphony, and Prokofiev’s first, the Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25.

“Haydn was the father of the symphonic genre,” says Miura. Also known as the “London” symphony and written in 1795, No. 104’s four movements “are filled with energy, emotion, wit and richly nuanced gesture,” the conductor explains.

A composer of the modern school, Prokofiev debuted his first symphony more than a century later, but had an eye on the classical model established by Haydn. “He reinterpreted the classical symphony with more modern, personalized language, again with a wide array of emotions — from serious to humorous, from elegant to wild,” Miura says.

This performance features both ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students and musicians from the community, ranging from age 13 to older adults. “It brings great pleasure to all of us for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra to have a real presence in Lewiston-Auburn,” says Miura. “I hope to reach out more to the community through music.”

Regarded as one of the world’s foremost players of harpsichord and fortepiano, Andreas Staier comes to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College to perform fortepiano music by Haydn at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 15, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Tickets, costing $12 for general admission and $6 for seniors and students, can be purchased at . For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The concert was originally scheduled for last fall, but postponed because of illness.

Performing on a Walther fortepiano replica built by R.J. Regier of Freeport, Staier will offer the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience sonatas and variations by Franz Josef Haydn. He is playing this particular program only twice during his current tour, at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and at Carnegie Hall.

The artist’s extensive catalog of recordings includes a 2005 collection of this music on the German subsidiary of the Harmonia Mundi label.

Born in Göttingen, Germany, Staier studied modern piano and harpsichord in Hannover and Amsterdam. From 1983 to 1986, he was the harpsichordist of Musica Antiqua Köln, with which he toured and recorded extensively.

Today Staier performs throughout Europe, the United States and Japan as a soloist and with orchestras such as Concerto Köln, Freiburger Barockorchester, the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin and the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées Paris. Staier has made many recordings of works from the Baroque through early Romantic eras. His solo work is often broadcast on the BBC.

John Corrie conducts the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir sings music by Schubert and Haydn in 8 p.m. concerts Friday and Saturday, Dec. 5 and 6, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The concerts are open to the public at no charge.

Directed by John Corrie and accompanied by musicians from the college and community, the 72-voice choir sings Franz Schubert’s Tov Lehodos and Franz Josef Haydn’s Te Deum and Lord Nelson Mass. Five choir members will sing solos.

Tov Lehodos is the only Hebrew text Schubert ever set to music. He completed this setting of a Jewish liturgical text in 1828, commissioned by the cantor of a Vienna synagogue.

The English naval hero Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson links the two Haydn pieces. Although Haydn’s setting of the Te Deum, a liturgical hymn of praise to God, was composed for the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, it was first performed during Nelson’s September 1800 visit to the court of Hungary’s noble Esterhazy family, for whom Haydn worked.

Originally titled Missa in angustiis (“Mass in the time of need”), the D-minor Mass now known as Lord Nelson was composed during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, in 1798. Nelson’s victory over the French in the Battle of the Nile is thought to have inspired Haydn as he composed the Mass, and the work was performed for Nelson during that same visit in 1800.

For more information about the concert, please call 207-786-6135.