DEMOREST - “James and Friends,” a concert featuring five organ, piano, and voice performers, including Piedmont College President James F. Mellichamp, will be held at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 25, at the college Chapel in Demorest.
The free concert will include Mellichamp on organ and piano, Sharon Beckstead of Toronto on organ, Steven Lawson of New York on organ, along with soprano Diane Johnson of New York and tenor Thomas Faracco of Philadelphia. Selections will include works by John Cook, Charles Ives, Denis Bédard, Frances Allitsen, Felix Mendelssohn, Ferdinand Hummel, Maurice Ravel, and Leonard Bernstein.
Mellichamp has performed organ concerts throughout the U.S. and Europe for more than 40 years. His concerts include solo recitals at the Washington Cathedral, Berlin Cathedral, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. In 2013 he performed seven concerts across Russia. A member of the music faculty at Piedmont since 1982, he has designed some 50 organs for churches and colleges in the United States. Originally from Toccoa, Mellichamp was an international organ scholarship recipient at the Hochschule fuer Musik, Herford, Germany, and holds a Doctor of Music degree from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
Beckstead has served as music director at Leaside United Church in Toronto, conducting the Chancel Choir and young voiced Junior Choir since 1993. She is a past president of The Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada and is currently provost of the Honourable Company of Organists in Toronto.
Faracco has appeared with a number of orchestras, including the St. Louis and Minnesota symphonies, the Cincinnati Opera, and the Marlboro Music Festival. Recent performances include the American premiere of the English version of Oskar Straus’s “The Merry Nibelungs” in New York and Philadelphia. From 1992 to 2008, he was an artist and faculty member at the Pitten Classics summer festival in Austria.
Johnson is a vocal artist-in-residence at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in her hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y. She received a master’s degree in voice from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. As a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she studied abroad in Italy and was later an apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program for Singers. She was a winner of the New Jersey State Operq and Regional Metropolitan Opera vocal competitions and performs across the U.S. and in Europe.
Lawson is the assisting organist at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City, a position he has held since 1997. He was for 10 years the director of music at St. Luke Lutheran Church in the Theatre District. While a graduate student at Indiana University, he accompanied the University Singers, working with conductors Robert Shaw and Margaret Hillis. He is active in the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and is the creator of “The New York City Organ Project,” an ongoing project to document the organs past and present in the five boroughs of New York City.
