Double bass faculty artist Paul Sharpe will be joined by several friends for his recital titled, “Yearning for Peace.” 

Beginning with a solo double bass sonata by the Ukrainian composer Yuri Levitin, this program takes us on a tour through Russia with Morton Gould's “Benny's Groove,” written for Benny Goodman's historic tour through Russia in 1962. Jazz, our quintessential American music genre, is celebrated in Frank Proto's setting of nine Langston Hughes poems in Afro-American Fragments for narrator, bass clarinet, cello and double bass. UNCSA alumnus Tyson Davis' “Tableau No. 5” and Lawrence Brown's “Five Negro Folk Songs” will complete the program. 

Joining Sharpe will be Division of Liberal Arts faculty member Reagan Mitchell, saxophone; and School of Music colleagues Oskar Espina Ruiz, clarinet; Brooks Whitehouse, cello; and Robert Rocco, piano. 

Sharpe is the principal bass of the Winston-Salem Symphony and Piedmont Opera, frequent guest principal and assistant principal bass of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra in South Carolina, and member of the Arizona MusicFest double bass section.