CONCERTS TO MEMORIALIZE UCI CELLIST

Two memorial concerts honoring cellist Gregory Donnell Smith will be at 8 p.m. tonight and Wednesday at the Fine Arts Concert Hall on the UC Irvine campus.

Smith, a graduate student at the university, drowned Oct. 10 while surf fishing in South Laguna.

Described as “very talented” by Stephen Erdody, conductor of the UCI chamber orchestra and the student’s cello instructor, Smith “was a young black graduate student from a very poor background who rose above all this and got a BA in music and was almost done with a master’s here.”

Smith had grown up in a poor section of San Francisco and had begun studying the cello while in a middle school there. He later got a scholarship to the Cincinnati Conservatory but after two years transferred to UCI where he became principal cellist with the school’s chamber and symphony orchestras.

The program tonight will include David Popper’s “Requiem for Three Cellos and Piano,” Brahms’ Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in B minor and Schubert’s String Quintet in C, Op. 163. Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who knew Smith and UCI music faculty will perform.

The program on Wednesday will include Faure’s Elegie for Cello and Orchestra; excerpts from Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ”; Hindemith’s “Kleiner Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2, and Mozart’s String Quartet in C, K. 157. Erdody will conduct the UCI Chamber Orchestra, with music students featured in the solo and chamber parts.

Tickets for tonight’s concert are $10 for general admission, $5 for students. Tickets for the Wednesday concert will be $5 for general admission, $2 for students.

Proceeds will be used to establish a scholarship fund for string students. For information, call (714) 856--6616.