Accomplished artists on the piano, trumpet, and violin will showcase their talents on Nov. 5 at the First Tuesday performance at 7 p.m. in the Chapel of All Faiths at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.  This night of strings and brass is open to the public at no charge.

The First Tuesday series features regional professional artists on the first Tuesdays of five months during the year.  Dr. Susan Roe, Director of Music for the School of Liberal Arts, is the First Tuesday Program Director.

Titled “Jurs and Friends”, the program will include Dr. Douglas Jurs from ABAC on piano, University of Georgia trumpet professor Brandon Craswell on trumpet, and Georgia Academy of Music instructor Fia Durrett on violin.  

Selections for the concert include Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Sonata in G for violin and piano, Op. 30 no. 3”, “Scherzo #2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31” composed by Frédéric Chopin, Francis Poulenc’s “Les Chemins De L’Amour”, “Prelude #2” written by George Gershwin, and Eric Ewazen’s “Trio for Trumpet, Violin, and Piano”.

     Jurs, a Chicago-born pianist, joined the ABAC faculty in 2012 as an assistant professor of piano and music theory. He had previously been on the piano faculties at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Edgewood College.  He has performed solo and collaborative recitals throughout the U.S. and abroad in cities such as Vienna, Nice, and Milan. He won first prize at the 2004 Lee Biennial Piano Competition and was the winner of the University of Wisconsin Beethoven Competition in 2010.  

Besides performing in concerts, Jurs presented a paper at the Wisconsin Science Festival about the intersection of cognitive science, biography and music performance in his own creative work.  He is also scheduled to present lecture recitals at College Music Society Southern and Northeastern Regional Conferences.  

Jurs is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Blue Horse Music Festival in Woodstock, Vt., a biannual winter/summer concert series that features acclaimed musicians performing in the intimate Blue Horse Inn music parlor.  He was one of the first teachers to work with the University of Wisconsin Piano Pioneers program, an initiative that brings affordable music lessons to low-income students.  

Jurs’ music degrees are from the University of Wisconsin, Cleveland Institute of Music, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he was a double major in piano and English literature.  

Craswell holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in trumpet performance from Indiana University and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Kentucky. Prior to his 2008 appointment to UGA, he coordinated the brass department and directed the jazz ensemble at Minot (N.D.) State University.  He has played with the Atlanta, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Honolulu Symphonies, including a performance at Carnegie Hall with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In the summer of 2010, he played principal trumpet with the Santiago, Chile Philharmonic.  

Adept at both classical and jazz, Craswell recently finished a North American tour of the Broadway musical “42nd Street”.  As a soloist, he has been a featured artist at the Aspen Music Festival and the International Romantic Trumpet Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Aside from performing in 48 of the 50 states, he has taught or performed in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Italy, and Russia. Craswell is a New York Trumpet Company performing artist.

Originally from Houston, Texas, Durrett made her debut with the Houston Symphony at the age of 18, playing the Brahms Violin Concerto. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where she served as concertmaster of both orchestras. An avid chamber musician, she was a prize winner in the Fischoff and Coleman Chamber Music Competitions and a finalist in the Concert Artist Guild International Competition.

Since moving to Atlanta in 2004, Durrett has been a tenured member of the Atlanta Opera Orchestra and served as a visiting professor at Georgia State University. Most recently, she was the first violinist of the Vega String Quartet, artists-in-residence at Emory University. Durrett spent summers at the Aspen Music Festival, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the Spoleto Festival in Italy, where she was concertmaster of the orchestra. She also co-founded Fringe Atlanta, which puts gifted composers, musicians, and visual artists together to showcase their talent in a fresh experience of the arts.

For more information on the First Tuesday Concert Series, interested persons can contact Roe at sroe@abac.edu.