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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For more information about the College, please call the Community Relations Office at (607) 436-2748 or send e-mail to Carol Blazina, Vice President for Community Relations.SUNY College at Oneonta - Ravine Parkway - Oneonta, NY 13820 - 607.436.3500
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