Great Barrington Maestro Peress to speak

GREAT BARRINGTON — Maestro Maurice Peress will be appearing at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 20, at the Du Bois Center , 684 South Main St. Having worked with Duke Ellington on the “Suite from Black, Brown and Beige,” Peress will speak on ” ‘Black, Brown and Beige,’ from unpublished poem to a seminal worked premiered at Carnegie Hall.”

Selected by Leonard Bernstein as an assistant conductor with the New York Philharmonic in 1961, Peress was music director of three American orchestras for two decades. Besides teaching at the Aaron Copland School of Music and the Graduate School of the City University, Peress has directed a series of historic American concerts for Carnegie Hall. His book, “Dvorak to Duke Ellington,” was recently published by Oxford University Press.