SaddleBrooke pianist, Sheryll McManus, has been invited to perform George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Tucson Concert Band on Sunday, April 8 at Sahuarita High School. McManus is a former pianist with the St. Louis and Indianapolis Symphonies, performing with artists including Henry Mancini, Doc Severinson, the ‘Moody Blues’ as well as music professor at Anderson College, Anderson, Indiana. She moved to Arizona in 2012 where she has been an active performer and teacher. She plays piano and violin in the Southern Arizona Symphony and has performed as piano soloist with that orchestra as well as the Tucson Repertory Orchestra and has sung with, as well as been the accompanist of, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Choir. Most recently she accepted the position of pianist and choir director at Oracle Union Church.
Lorelei Allison Conrad, Lieutenant Commander, USN, is the conductor of the Tucson Concert Band and was the first woman to conduct a U.S. Navy Band. She began her career as a U.S. Navy musician, first as an enlisted trumpet player with the U.S. Naval Academy Band, and later making naval history as the first woman to receive a commission as Ensign, becoming the first woman to serve as Navy Limited Duty Bandmaster. Her assignments included Director of Navy Band San Francisco, Associate Conductor U.S. Navy Band Washington, D.C., Interim Music Liason Officer for Chief of Information at the Pentagon as well as many others. She has recently returned from San Diego with the Tucson Concert Band where they performed with the Navy Band Southwest, as well as performing a concert on the U.S.S. Midway, an aircraft carrier of the U.S. Navy, formerly the lead ship of her class and the first U.S. aircraft carrier too big to transit the Panama Canal. For more information on the concert, contact [email protected].