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ONEONTA, N.Y. -- The SUNY College at Oneonta in association with the
Catskill Conservatory will present the public debut of local composer and
pianist Dr. Anthony Cicoria in concerts at Goodrich Theater in the College's
Fine Arts Building at 7:30 p.m. on both Tuesday, January 29, and Monday,
February 4. Admission to the concerts, which are part of the Hewitt
Pantaleoni Memorial Concert Series, is complimentary, and members of the
community are invited to attend. Reservations are necessary and are
available on a first-call, first-served basis through the Goodrich Theater
box office at (607) 436-3100. A reception to honor Dr. Cicoria will be held
following the January 29 concert.
Each concert will feature an identical hour-long presentation of Dr.
Cicoria's original music for solo piano. In a lecture-recital format, he
will present premier performances of his three-movement Lightning Sonata,
opus 1, Nocturne, opus 2, and Rhapsody in D Minor, opus 3,
which is dedicated to the memory of Dr. John Lusins.
Dr. Cicoria, a resident of Oneonta, is a board-certified orthopedic
surgeon who is Chief of the Medical Staff at Chenango Memorial Hospital in
Norwich and Clinical Assistant Professor of Orthopedics at SUNY Upstate
Medical Center in Syracuse. In 1994, while using a public telephone during a
family outing near Albany, he was struck by lightning and survived a
near-death experience. Shortly thereafter, he developed an insatiable desire
to hear and play the piano. Around the same time, music started coming to
him in dreams, some of which ultimately formed the core of the compositions
in his upcoming programs.
After attempting to teach himself for three years, Dr. Cicoria came under
the tutelage of pianist Sandra McKane of Oneonta in 1998, and she has been
his teacher ever since. Dr. Cicoria's remarkable experience has been widely
reported. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author of numerous books on the
functioning of the human brain, has published an article on him in the
New Yorker magazine, "A Bolt from the Blue," and that article became the
basis for the first chapter of Sacks' current best-selling book,
Musicophilia. Several television documentaries on Dr. Cicoria's
story are in the works. Crews from the BBC Imagine series, Granada
Television, and German National Television plan to film the concert on
January 29.
The Hewitt Pantaleoni Memorial Concert Series is presented as a gift to
the community by the Catskill Conservatory and the SUNY College at Oneonta
with funding assistance from the New York State Council on the Arts. More
information about the series and the concert is available from Carleton Clay
of the SUNY-Oneonta
Music
Department at (607) 436-3419.
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