What better way to spend the coolest, wettest quarter than inside at concerts, plays and exhibitions? Through its academic programs, galleries and the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis offers music from classical to experimental, theater pieces big and small, art of all kinds and visits by two Pulitzer Prize winners.

Music and Words

The Music and Words Festival, Jan. 27-31, will be one of the biggest happenings of the entire year, not just the quarter. It brings to campus Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner, the Sō Percussion ensemble and emerging composers from around the nation for seven concerts over four days. One of the key events will be a performance of Luciano Berio’s rarely-played Sinfonia for orchestra and eight amplified voices by the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra with the Volti vocal group from San Francisco.

The Alumni Chorus, University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Thomas, music professor and director of the American Bach Soloists, join forces for a concert of music by Vaughan Williams, Felix Mendelssohn and Herbert Howells on March 8.

Other Department of Music concerts include Splinter Reeds, premiering student compositions; the university Concert Band, Jazz, Baroque and Gamelan ensembles; and free concerts every Thursday at noon.

Well-known Indian musician Sikkil Gurucharan, a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, will present Jugalbandi: Carnatic and Hindustani Music, Feb. 25, in collaboration with the music department.

Department of Music online calendar.

The Mondavi Center presents …

As usual, the Mondavi Center has world-class visitors of all genres filling the calendar: Itzhak Perlman, one of the greatest violinists of the last 50 years, Jan.17; jazz singer Gregory Porter, who has shot to the top of every “best of” list during the past three years, Jan. 19; recently-retired New York City Ballet star Wendy Whelan with her evening of original duets, “Restless Creature,” Jan. 24; and just for fun the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Jan. 28. And that’s just January.

The remainder of the quarter offers legendary South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela,; the Curtis Chamber Orchestra; Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with Charles Dutoit conducting; the London Symphony Orchestra with pianist Yuja Wang, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; pianist Lang Lang; Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq; and Julian Sands in A Celebration of Harold Pinter, directed by John Malkovich.

Cold climate, warm hearts

The C.N. Gorman Museum, part of the Department of Native American Studies, invites visitors to explore the Arctic in “Listening to the Stone: Original Inuit Art,” loaned by an alumni couple, Jürg and Christel Bieri. Through June 11. Read more in this news release.

Faculty members Jessica Bissett Perea (Native American studies) and Chris Darwent (anthropology) have organized a related symposium, “Arctic Indigeneities, Media and Social Justice,” March 13-14. Perea and Darwent also have partnered with the Mondavi Center to present a pair of concerts by Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq (both performances are sold out).

The Nelson Gallery is reviving a Valentine’s Day tradition that was the talk of the town and campus for several decades. The Artists’ Valentine Redux is an exhibition and auction of 100 works by regional artists, including several Department of Art faculty. The exhibition runs Jan. 15-Feb. 14, with the auction planned as part of a party set to start at 7 p.m. Feb. 14.

Also at the Nelson, through May 10: “MAKE: A New Museum for UC Davis,” an exhibition that invites the public’s input on programs and spaces that will shape the visitor experience at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, now under construction.

Everyone is invited to the museum’s topping-out ceremony, March 13, after the last beam has been raised into place. People can sign a beam that will be installed and visible in the completed museum.

The Design Museum presents “Red Dress: Design Stories for Heart Health,” an exhibition of red dresses created by design students over the last five years to raise awareness of cardiovascular disease among women. A joint project of the Design Collection and the UC Davis Women’s Cardiovascular Medicine Program, the exhibition runs Jan. 15-March 13.

Art and poetry

The Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series continues with Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Jan. 15; Saul Melman, a multidisciplinary artist from New York, Feb. 19; and Rico Gatson, a Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor, March 12. All talks are set for 4:30 p.m. in the Art Annex.

Padma Kaimal, an art professor at Colgate University, will give this year’s Templeton Lecture in Art History, on the subject of the Kailasanatha Temple in India. The program is scheduled for Jan. 9 at the Nelson Gallery.

The Nelson is also the venue for a poetry event: a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Glück, Feb. 24, hosted by the Department of English. She won her Pulitzer in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris, one of her 12 volumes. She’s also received a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award and an Academy of American Poets prize.

Woyzeck and new dance works

The Department of Theatre and Dance presents Woyzeck, Georg Büchner’s influential play from the 1830s about the dehumanizing effects of the military and medicine on a young man. The UC Davis production, Feb. 26-March 8, is a reimagining by Neil LaBute (“The Shape of Things” and “In the Company of Men”), with direction by Granada Artist-in-Residence Bob McGrath, who led the premiere production of LeBute’s adaptation in 2012.

The Institute for Exploration in Theatre, Dance and Performance will present two-newly created student dance works: Underbelly, by Tiffany Martin, March 2; and Disequilibria, by Raissa Simpson, who is collaborating with the PUSH Dance Company, March 20.

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