Erik Lindgren with Friends from the Brockton Symphony In Concert

May 9, 2015 at 7:30 PM

• Thomasine Berg-flute
• Torben Hansen-clarinet
• Mark Finklestein-bassoon
• Erik Lindgren-piano

Erik Lindgren with Friends from the Brockton Symphony Orchestra will perform live at the Middleborough Public Library, 102 North Main Street, on Saturday, May 9 at 7:30 PM. Admission is free and open to the public, and is handicapped-accessible.

The concert will feature original works and arrangements by Lindgren, who is a board member of the Brockton Symphony Orchestra and is excited to be working with musicians from this professional regional group.

Thomasine Berg earned a master’s degree in flute performance from the University of Michigan, studying with Keith Bryan. She was also a student of Boston Symphony Orchestra flutist/piccolo Lois Schaefer. Under Hans Swarowsky, she was principal flutist in the conductor’s symposium orchestra at the Vienna Conservatory, and has been a member of the Flint (Michigan) Symphony Orchestra, the Opera Festival Orchestra of Las Palmas, Canary Islands, and the Blue Hills Chamber Players in the Boston area. Most recently, she served as editor of classical music and visual arts for the Boston Globe while continuing to perform as a freelance chamber musician and soloist.

Mark Finklestein is a physician by day and musician by night. He is the principal oboist for the Brockton Symphony Orchestra and the principal bassoonist for the Sharon Community Chamber Orchestra. Mr Finklestein is currently a bassoon student of Susan Wood of Providence, RI and has played in numerous pit orchestras for local theatre productions along with the Frankenstein Consort with Erik Lindgren. He has 25 years of professional musical experience and also performs in chamber groups and recitals on clarinet, oboe, English horn, and bassoon.

Torben Hansen, clarinet, has studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Mount Union College, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the New England Conservatory of Music where he received his master of music degree in performance. His teachers have included Theodore Johnson, Robert Marcellus and Peter Hadcock. He has soloed with the Chamber Orchestra of Cape Ann, the Tri-Town Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Wind Symphony. Mr. Hansen is presently retired from the Braintree Public Schools and is principal clarinet with the Brockton Symphony and Quincy Symphony Orchestras. Outside of music, Mr. Hansen enjoys traveling with his wife Leslie, fly-fishing in Maine, building furniture in his woodshop and photographing wildlife.

Erik Lindgren received his BA in Music from Tufts University in 1976 where he worked with T.J. Anderson. In 1975–’76 he spent his junior year abroad in London studying composition at the Guildhall School Of Music with Alfred Nieman and piano with Birgette Wild. Lindgren received an MA in music composition and piano performance from The University of Iowa in 1977 where he studied with Donald Jenni, Richard Hervig and Peter Lewis. As a contemporary classical composer, Lindgren has a catalog of over six dozen compositions, ranging from solo piano pieces to chamber music to orchestral works. In 2012, the Georgia Symphony Orchestra commissioned Lindgren to write Extreme Spirituals," a 25-minute work for orchestra and bass baritone soloist which was premiered in Atlanta. Recently he was commissioned by the Chamber Orchestra of Boston to arrange two original tangos.

In 1978, Lindgren established Sounds Interesting Productions, a commercial recording studio and music production company. National and regional credits include original scores for all three networks, PBS, Eastpak, Boston Globe, Basketball Hall Of Fame, Jordan Marsh, Polaroid, Prentice-Hall and the Christmas Tree Shops. Since 1980, Lindgren has been a founding member of the new music ensemble Birdsongs of The Mesozoic that Billboard Magazine described as “a mesmerizing venture into the space age jungle.“ The quartet has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, and has released 11 CDs for the Rykodisc, Cuneiform, and Ace Of Hearts labels. The group has collaborated with Duplex Planet editor/NPR correspondent David Greenberger on 1001 Real Apes, and Atlanta bass baritone Oral Moses on Extreme Spirituals.

The Boston Globe has described Erik Lindgren as “a model of musical schizophrenia…the type who’ll play Stravinsky and ‘Louie Louie’ back-to-back, with one foot in the conservatory and the other in the garage.“ Philadelphia Primetime writes “if Aaron Copeland or Lenny Bernstein were born in the 1950s, they might've composed stuff not dissimilar to Lindgren’s [CD] Classical-a-Go Go which is one rollicking, cerebrally stimulating good time.“

Additional information about Erik Lindgren’s musical career can be found on his personal website.

The program is supported in part by a grant from the Middleborough Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.