IC News

Acis and Galatea, February 25–March 2 | Hoerner Theatre

Handel’s Acis and Galatea opens the spring theatre season with a work that is deceptively spare and quietly demanding. Written in the early 18th century, the pastoral chamber opera sits at the intersection of intimacy and myth, telling the story of two lovers undone by jealousy and violence.

For Christopher Zemliauskas, associate professor of music performance and director of the production, the choice was driven by the music itself and by the distinctive experience it offers student performers.

“Doing Baroque opera at a college is a little bit tricky,” Zemliauskas said, noting that the genre is typically the domain of specialists. Acis and Galatea , however, offers a rare opening: shorter than most Handel operas, written for a small ensemble, and rich with dramatic purpose. “It’s some of his most beautiful writing,” he said. “There’s a simplicity to the piece that’s really striking and that lends itself well to telling the story on stage.”

The staging itself extends that clarity beyond the music. In addition to the principal cast and vocal chorus, Zemliauskas has incorporated a small company of dancers, choreographed by associate professor of theatre and dance performance Amy O’Brien, who function as a visual counterpart. “They act very much like a Greek chorus,” he said, shifting between the human and supernatural worlds and helping to “visualize the drama that’s going on,” even during solo arias.

For Zemliauskas, the collaboration is also forward-looking. With Ithaca College set to launch its new Dance and Choreography in Musical Theatre major next fall, the production offers what he described as “almost a preview of what’s to come,” foregrounding movement as a central storytelling force alongside voice and music.

The production also places unusual demands on the Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra, which will accompany all four performances. For Ho-Yin Kwok, assistant professor of music performance and conductor of the orchestra, Acis and Galatea presents a set of challenges that college orchestras rarely encounter.

“It’s not common for a college orchestra—first of all, of undergrad students—to play an opera,” Kwok said. “Number two is to play Baroque music.”

Baroque opera presents logistical and musical challenges that most college orchestras rarely encounter. The score calls for a smaller ensemble and period-specific style, even as a full symphony orchestra must be accommodated. To make that possible, Kwok has divided the orchestra into three smaller ensembles, each rotating through the run so that every student has time in the orchestra pit.

“Everything that, in a college orchestra, you don’t usually get to experience,” Kwok said. “That’s something very exciting.”

Spring Awakening, April 8–12 | Clark Theatre

If Acis and Galatea asks for precision and restraint, Spring Awakening demands emotional risk and vulnerability. The Tony Award–winning musical, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, fuses a 19th-century source text by Frank Wedekund with a contemporary rock score to confront adolescence and sexual awakening under the weight of repression.

For Amanda Morton, assistant professor of theatre and dance performance and music director for the production, the work feels uniquely suited to college performers. “Young people—people who are closest in age to this story—are going to be the best interpreters,” she said. “They’re so close to the confusion, the urgency, the intensity of it.”

Morton describes the score as emotionally direct and musically sophisticated, drawing on the language of popular music that already shapes students’ lives. “Popular music becomes the soundtrack of adolescence,” she said. “So when you ask students to live inside that sound while telling a story, it’s incredibly potent.”

The Comedy of Errors, April 29–May 3 | Hoerner Theatre

Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors closes the mainstage season with one of the Bard’s most enduring comic constructions: mistaken identity. Built around two sets of identical twins separated at birth, the play unfolds through a series of confusions and near misses as characters cross paths in the city of Ephesus, each certain they are being wronged (or recognized) by the wrong person.

The play draws on the conventions of classical farce, borrowing its structure from Roman comedy and relying on coincidence, misunderstanding, and repetition to drive the action forward. Errors multiply until identity, family, and order are finally restored.

Symphony Orchestra : A Theatrical Semester 
April 6 at 8:15 pm | Ford Hall
May 4 at 8:15 pm | Ford Hall

For the Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra, Spring 2026 is defined by storytelling.

“It’s really a semester of theatrical music,” said orchestra conductor Ho-Yin Kwok, assistant professor of music performance and conductor of the orchestra.

The season begins with the MLK Concert on January 25 (see above), where the orchestra joins a large ensemble of performers from across the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. Kwok points to the Florence Price Violin Concerto—performed with faculty violinist Teagan Faran—as a work that resonated deeply with the concert’s themes. “Florence Price is one of the most important African American composers,” he said.

From there, the orchestra moves directly into what Kwok calls “opera mode,” accompanying Handel’s Acis and Galatea in late February and early March before returning with Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle on April 6. Though often staged as an opera, Bartók’s work is presented here as a concert drama.

“It’s really a psychological drama between two people,” Kwok said. The production features faculty soprano Tamara Acosta as Judith and guest artist bass Curtis Streetman in the title role, alongside what Kwok describes as “a huge orchestra,” complete with offstage brass and theatrical stage effects brought by nationally renowned stage director Ben Robinson.

“It’s going to be a really thrilling experience for the students,” he said. “A full-blown, professional production.”

The orchestra’s theatrical arc continues through its final concert of the season on May 4, which brings together student creation, solo performance, and one of the most iconic works of 20th-century musical theatre.

The program opens with Rupture, a new composition by Ithaca College alumnus Max Langer ’25 who earned this year’s composition prize. Kwok describes the piece as “a very, very energetic overture to the concert,” setting the tone for a night that foregrounds student work at the highest level.

The concert will also feature the winners of the IC Concerto Competition, who perform the same works they prepared for the competition itself. Students spend months—sometimes years—preparing these pieces, and the performance honors that investment by allowing them to play “their” music with the orchestra at its fullest.

The second half of the concert returns fully to the semester’s theatrical spine with Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story Symphonic Dances, performed in their entirety.

Wind Ensemble : Giving Voice
February 20 at 7:00 pm | Ford Hall
April 10 at 7:00 pm | Ford Hall

Daniel Cook, assistant professor of music performance and director of bands, describes the spring Wind Ensemble season as one shaped by storytelling and collective accountability, by music that asks not just for technical command, but for awareness of whose stories are being carried.

The opening concert on February 20, Giving Voice, coincides with World Day of Social Justice and centers music that amplifies voices that are marginalized, remembered, or imagined. “It’s not enough just to play the notes,” Cook said. “You have to inhabit the character of the music—to understand whose voice you’re carrying.”

At the center of the program is Symphony No. 2, titled “Voices," by James Stephenson, a large-scale work that weaves together personal memory and shared experience. The piece includes a mezzo-soprano soloist—sung by faculty member Lisa Williamson—and moves between moments of intensity and fragility. Cook described the work as carrying “the voice of everybody.”

The program also features a spiritual suite by Margaret Bonds, honoring one of the most influential African American women composers of the 20th century, alongside In This Breath by Shuying Li, written in memoriam of the composer’s husband. The concert opens with Chancla, an Afro-Cuban–inspired work Cook described as “rip-roaring,” offering a kinetic counterpoint to the program’s more reflective moments.

The Wind Ensemble returns to the stage on April 10 for a concert that celebrates the 60th anniversary of Ithaca College’s saxophone studio, an event Cook described—with some understatement—as “a big deal.” Led by faculty saxophonist Eric Troiano, the concert reunites alumni from across generations and features the world premiere of a new saxophone concerto by faculty composer Sally McCune, performed by Troiano with the Wind Ensemble.

“That’s going to be super cool,” Cook said. “The ink is still wet.”

The program also includes David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4, a large-scale, emotionally expansive work Cook described as moving through “everything—reflective, brutal, celebratory, peaceful.”