MACON, Ga. – The Grand Opera House will be the setting for an evening of music with world-renowned violinist Robert McDuffie and pianists Susan McDuffie and Margery McDuffie Whatley, as they each perform with the Macon Symphony Orchestra at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 3. Adrian Gnam will be the musical director and conductor. The program will include works by Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns.
A pre-concert reception will be held at The Grand Opera House, 651 Mulberry St., for all ticket holders, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Tickets for the musical gala are $100, $75 and $50, depending on seat location. To order tickets, call (478) 301-5300.
Proceeds from the concert will benefit the Macon Symphony Orchestra and The Grand Opera House. A portion of the proceeds will also benefit the Robert McDuffie Violin Scholarship offered through Mercer University’s College of Liberal Arts. Robert McDuffie was recently appointed Distinguished University Professor of Music at Mercer.
Robert McDuffie has performed as a soloist with many of the major orchestras of the world, including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, and Toronto Symphonies, the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Minnesota Orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the North German Radio Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala, Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome and all of the major orchestras of Australia.
He is a Grammy nominated artist whose acclaimed recordings for Telarc include the violin concertos of Mendelssohn, Bruch, Adams, Glass, Barber, and Rosa, as well as Viennese favorites. He has been profiled on NBC’s “Today,” CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” PBS’s “Charlie Rose,” A&E’s “Breakfast with the Arts” and in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
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Susan McDuffie, once called the “granddame of classical music” in Macon by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is well-known as a concert pianist. Students of her private studio over the last 40 years have won state and local piano competitions under her direction. She was the recipient of the Macon Arts Alliance Cultural Award in 1998 for her outstanding contributions to the Middle Georgia arts scene.
Head of the Music Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Margery McDuffie Whatley is an acclaimed pianist, teacher and recording artist. She has performed in the United States Supreme Court in Washington D.C., the World Congress Center in Atlanta and the Georgia Governor’s Mansion. Her most recent recording features works by Bach, Haydn, Brahms and Ravel.
