MADELINE ROGERS RETURNS TO THE SIC STAGE APRIL 3

Eldorado native, Dr. Madeline Rogers, will return to the Southeastern Illinois College Allan G. Kimball Stage April 3 at 2 p.m. as part of the SIC Cultural Arts Series.

An SIC music alumna, Rogers will be performing piano selections from Amy Beach (1867-1944), Victoria Bond (b. 1945), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).

Rogers, who started formal piano lessons at age three, began performing with SIC’s music program and summer theatre at the age of six. By age 13, she was attending SIC full-time progressing quickly as a pianist, vocalist, and actress. She quickly became an accompanist for the SIC Community Chorus and a music instructor for area children.

“In 2011, I began my collegiate career at Southeastern Illinois College with an insatiable desire to learn and no clue where my educational journey would lead. Eleven years later, I have a DMA in Piano Performance, a fantastic job at the Omaha Conservatory of Music, and countless collaborative experiences with wonderful musicians from all over the world,” said Rogers in a recent social media post.

 “SIC gave me an indescribably important foundation on which to build my educational journey and I couldn’t be more grateful for all the opportunities SIC provided!” said Rogers in a thank you email to SIC President Dr. Jonah Rice just a week after achieving her Doctorate in Musical Arts from University of Nebraska.

Dr. Jonah Rice said of Rogers, “Sometimes these amazingly talented students from our rural district find us, and we are able to nurture them with individual attention and encouragement, and they become these tremendously capable adults who come back to share their talents with us. We’re thrilled to have Madeline back in Southern Illinois, and I look so forward to this concert.”

After SIC, Rogers attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale at age 15 to earn a Bachelors in Piano Performance. She went on from there to earn a Master’s in Music from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music as a student of André Watts before earning her Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Nebraska with Dr. Paul Barnes. While attending IU, Rogers also studied vocal performance with Patricia Havranek and performed collaboratively under the instruction of Dr. Charles Prestinari.

Rogers is an accomplished solo and collaborative performer in the US and abroad. She is frequently requested to collaborate with other faculty and guest artists, most recently performing a program featuring all vocal faculty from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In 2019, Rogers collaborated with faculty from various campuses across Nebraska to present a program of chamber music inspired by Shakespeare at Churchill College in Cambridge, UK. Other international performances include collaboration with Maestro Andrea Grassi in 2017, in lectures pertaining to his Henle Urtext edition of the clarinet music of Brahms. In July of 2022, Rogers will be presenting a solo piano program at Brahms’s house in Baden-Baden, Germany, combined with a research project on his late works.  

A proponent of living composers, Rogers has worked closely with Victoria Bond to revive a piano concerto that was last performed in 1997 and was the first to premiere the two-piano version of the concerto in April 2021. Her doctoral research included tracing cyclicism and romantic elements within the chant-inspired piano pieces of Victoria Bond. This research culminated in commissioning fellow doctoral student Christian Johnson to transcribe the orchestral reduction of Bond’s first piano concerto, funded by grants from the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts and the Glenn Korff School of Music, which was subsequently presented at the Nebraska Music Teachers Association Conference in October of 2021.  

Rogers is an experienced instructor, having taught in both private studio and class piano settings since 2010. While pursuing her doctorate at UNL she served as studio assistant to Dr. Paul Barnes, teaching collegiate pianists and instructing applied lessons and piano literature classes. She currently serves as an Artist-Faculty member teaching solo and collaborative piano at the Omaha Conservatory of Music in Nebraska.

Rogers will be joined in concert for one song selection by her friend and fellow musician, coloratura soprano Annika Shaw of Bloomington, Indiana. While studying at Brigham Young University-Idaho, Shaw performed several leading operatic roles, and went on to be featured as a soloist with the Saddleback Symphony Orchestra, the Rexburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra. While earning her Master of Music degree in vocal performance at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, she appeared in the IU Opera Theater’s mainstage production of Ariadne auf Naxos as Zerbinetta, and the Bloomington Chamber Opera’s production of Die Zauberflöte as the Queen of the Night.

Tickets for the April 3 concert are $10 for adults and $5 for students at the door. For more information, contact boxoffice@sic.edu or (618) 252-5400, ext. 2486.

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