FSUCO to Play at Senior Center

The Fairmont State University Community Orchestra will move to a new venue for its concert at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 13. The Marion County Senior Center, 105 Maplewood Drive, Fairmont, will host the orchestra for the first time. The public is invited to attend the free program.

The free concert will include works by Beethoven, Handel and Brahms, and FSU Senior music major Ashley Davis will be the featured soloist, singing "Let the Bright Seraphim" from Handel's Oratorio "Samson." A new work by Conductor Jack Ashton will premier at this event.

Ashton's compositions have been widely performed and his most recent orchestral work was recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava, Slovakia, under the direction of Robert Black. "Symphonic Movement for Small Orchestra," which will be played on this concert, was originally conceived for large symphony orchestra, but after some original sketches were lost, the work was re-written and re-scored for reduced forces. It was completed in January 2008 and this is its first performance.

John Ashton is the music director and conductor of the Fairmont State University Community Orchestra and conductor of the West Virginia University Community Arts Orchestra. He was the associate conductor of the Bedford Springs Festival Orchestra for six years and is a former member of the United States Naval Academy Band, the Savannah Symphony Orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, the Radio Telefis Eireann Symphony Orchestra (in Dublin, Ireland) and the New Orleans Philharmonic. He has performed with the Pittsburgh Ballet and Opera Theatre Orchestras, the Pittsburgh Symphony and was for 14 years a member of the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera Orchestra. He has served on the teaching staff of the University of Nebraska and Carnegie Mellon University as well as at Fairmont State, and his compositions are published by Seesaw Music in New York. Some of his works are to be found in the collections of the Carnegie Music Library in Pittsburgh in the Fleischer Collection of orchestral music, part of the Philadelphia Free Library, and in the Library of Congress. His biography is included in numerous volumes, including the International Who's Who in Music.