The arts are existential, expressive, engaged, and even enraged, and they're especially essential during times of threat and challenge. With Art is Essential, presented by RC music faculty including Katri Ervamaa (cello) and Jennifer Goltz-Taylor (voice), as well as Alex Wand (guitar), Naki Sung Kripfgans (piano/keyboard), Mark Kirschenmann (trumpet), guest artists Maria Sampen (violin), Kevin Schempf (clarinet), Tracy Doyle (flute), and John Boonenberg (piano), and RC chamber music students including Ian Rosenberg (viola) and Andrew Calabrese-Day (violin), we reach through time and experience to understand our world now and find inspiration to take action. Join us for pre-concert activities -- an Engaged Art fair (5.30-7pm) featuring RC community-engaged arts programs, centers and student organizations in the Keene Theater lobby and a pre-concert talk (6-6:45pm) digging into the concert repertoire with some of the evening's performers -- and stay for the concert at 7pm in East Quad's Keene Theater, featuring Arnold Schoenberg's expressionist vision Pierrot lunaire, Terezin composer Viktor Ullman's existential third string quartet, Louis Andriessen's incisive engagement of labor issues Workers Union, and John Berners' enraged new political cabaret cycle What Kind of Times are These.

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