TICKETS: $10 Adults, $5 Students
(Audience members will receive a free cup of coffee — or soda or water — with the entrance fee.)
​
  • Advance tickets can be purchased online through either lynchburgtickets or through Eventbrite (click on the either button below) .​​
  • Or at the door beginning 30 minutes before event (cash or checks only; first come first served. ​​

Doors will open at 2:30 pm. 
Baines Books and Coffee will be open
from 2:30-3:30 pm. 
Quiche and sandwiches 
available for purchase. 

Audiences are asked to wear masks
​while not eating or drinking,
​and will be seated at socially distanced tables inside.

Gus Miller’s jazz specialty is singing old favorites of the 1930s through the early 1960s such as Summertime, Fly Me to the Moon, Moon River, and the musical theatre favorites of Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Performing with Gus Miller will be Larry Scott, drums; Gary Meisner, piano; Glenn Buck, saxophone; and Bob Bowen, bass.
McGustivus “Gus” Miller started singing as a baritone “Crooner” at the age of fifty. He says that he never sang in school or in church as a young man. In fact, Gus says he set out to play piano, “….But I didn’t have the aptitude. My teacher said, ‘Have you ever thought about singing?’ My music teacher had started out as a singer. She took me around to hear people like Lew Taylor, and I started to sit in with him. She’d say, ‘I have a guy I think you’ll really like!’… and I started to sit in!” Soon, Gus Miller was headlining performances at the Academy Center of the Arts, Jazz Street, Montana’s, and the Roanoke Hotel. Gus says he finds singing “therapeutic—it keeps me from being introverted.”

Gus grew up in Lynchburg, graduating from Dunbar High School before moving to Amherst in 1966 for two years to work for the telephone company. He worked for WSET as a technician for 12 years, and for the Harris Company as well, before establishing his own business.
​
Lynn Kable of AGAR says, “We are very pleased to welcome Gus back to Amherst, especially after scheduling him to perform in spring 2020 at Ernest Deane’s recommendation, and then having to cancel and reschedule him to sing in April of 2021 after the pandemic! We are all looking forward to this concert!”
For more information,
call (434) 989-3215 or email
AmherstGlebeArts@gmail.com

Second Stage Amherst
194 Second Street
​Amherst, VA 24521
Virtual YouTube Concert
Online until June 25, 2021
TICKETS: $15 Adults, $5 Students
(click on button below to order)
With ticket purchase you will receive
​a private link to the concert on
AGAR’s YouTube Channel
​and may view it unlimited times 
​until 10 pm June 25, 2021.
(l-r) Lutenists Cameron Welke and  Richard Stone
Virtuoso lutenist Richard Stone was introduced to the ensemble music of his favorite lute composer, Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), while he was studying in London in the 1980s as a Fullbright/Lusk fellow. That was when he attended a lecture where he heard a Weiss lute concerto whose entire accompaniment was reconstructed by the lecturer, because only the solo part survived; the original orchestral parts were lost. Richard was fascinated. Upon finding that no original accompaniments existed for any of Weiss’s other ensemble music, including several lute duets, he decided "to try my hand at reconstructing the rest of them myself." The concertos and sonatas he reconstructed launched his group, Tempesta di Mare, the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, and the group’s success left no time to complete four Weiss lute duets. He put them aside for a future time -- and that time came in 2019.

​Stone said on his blog for the orchestra: "Tempesta Di Mare's 2019 Artist Recital Series included the modern premiere of four lute duets by Bach-contemporary Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750). Rehearsing and previewing these Weiss duets with my partner Cameron Welke was some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing lute."

Stone, Welke, and rural presenter Amherst Glebe Arts Response, Inc (AGAR), enthusiastically planned a repeat of the duets for the AGAR chamber music concert series in rural Amherst, Virginia in Spring 2020, only to be frustrated by COVID-19. Now, working together, we are managing to bring this extraordinary work to you in a virtual performance, "Duo Silvio."  
Richard Stone has performed as soloist and accompanist worldwide. The New York Times called his playing “beautiful” and “lustrously melancholy,” while the Washington Post described it as having “the energy of a rock solo and the craft of a classical cadenza.” Solo recordings include the complete Weiss lute concerti and the Fasch lute concerto. He co-directs Tempesta di Mare, the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, which records exclusively for the British label Chandos. Stone has conducted from Orlando to Taipei, leading from the theorbo in repertoire from Monteverdi to Handel, and has also accompanied many of today’s leading singers. Further recording and broadcast credits include Deutsche Grammophon, Lyrichord, PGM, Musical Heritage, Polygram, Vienna Modern Masters, ATMA, Eklecta, Centaur, Bis, Chesky, NPR, Czech Radio 3-Vltava and the BBC. Stone is professor of baroque lutes at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and an adjunct lute instructor for the Curtis Institute. He studied lute with Patrick O’Brien and guitar with David Starobin at SUNY Purchase, and with Nigel North at London’s Guildhall School as a Fulbright Scholar. 

Cameron Welke spends most of his time explaining to well-meaning strangers that the lute is, in fact, quite a different instrument from the flute. He brings a passionate curiosity and a deep creative drive to all manner of historical plucked instruments, which he plays with “expert technical dexterity, consummate phrasing and endearing expressivity“ (Chestnut Hill Local). Past and current engagements include performances with the Washington Bach Consort, Tempesta di Mare, Early Music City, the Baltimore Baroque Band, Vivi Cantando, and the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble. He gave the modern premiere of reconstructions of lute duets by Sylvius Leopold Weiss alongside Richard Stone in the fall of 2019, and he explores Renaissance and Baroque song repertoire in his trio Sacred Monsters with soprano Kyle Leigh Carney and multi-instrumentalist Niccolo Seligmann. Cameron began his musical life as a classical violinist and a rock and jazz guitarist. He holds a B.M. in classical guitar performance from Belmont University, where he studied with Francis Perry and John Pell, and a M.M. in historical performance on lute and theorbo from the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Richard Stone.

COMPOSER SILVIUS LEOPOLD WEISS (1687–1750) was born in German-speaking Grottkau, Silesia, near Breslau (now Grodków and Wrocław in modern-day Poland). He, his brother Johann Sigismund and sister Juliana Margareta all learned lute from their father, Johann Jakob Weiss, who one contemporary biographer noted as “a profound musician.” A child prodidigy, by age seven Silvius Leopold had performed for Emperor Leopold I, and in his early 30’s he won an appointment at the court of Dresden, where he remained the rest of his career as a member of its legendary Hofkapelle. Despite the lute’s being among the quietest of instruments, best suited for small audiences, Weiss became the highest paid instrumentalist on the Hofkapelle payroll. He gained an enduring reputation as the greatest lutenist of his day, bearing frequent comparison with J.S. Bach for the quality of his compositions and improvisations.
Events Subject To Change
“Women Making a Positive Difference ​In Amherst County 1920-2020”
Owing to Covid-19, Amherst Glebe Arts Response, Inc. (AGAR) is working hard to bring virtual or social-distancing concerts to you.

Click on the link below to go to our Facebook page and "like" us or "follow" us in order to view the Facebook Live concerts and learn about upcoming events.
Or check out our YouTube Channel by clicking the link below.
AGAR’s programs in 2020-2021: Funding has been provided by Virginia Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act economic stabilization plan of 2020; The Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Greater Lynchburg Community Foundation; and Amherst County Board of Supervisors CARES.
Amherst Glebe Arts Response, Inc. (AGAR)  |  156 Patrick Henry Highway, Amherst, VA 24521 
US Mail:  PO Box 117, Clifford, VA 24533   |   (434) 989-3215
Email: AmherstGlebeArts@gmail.com   |   Facebook: AmherstGlebeArtsResponse