Monday, January 12, 2026
7:00 PM
Florence Kopleff Recital Hall
Johannes Brahms | 1833-1897
Serenade No. 1, Op. 11
I. Allegro II. Scherzo III. Adagio non troppo IV. Menuetti V. Scherzo VI. Rondo
Robert J. Ambrose
Conductor Robert J. Ambrose enjoys a highly successful and diverse career as a dynamic and engaging musician. His musical interests cross many genres and can be seen in the wide range of professional activities he pursues. Dr. Ambrose studied formally at Boston College, Boston University and Northwestern University, where he received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting.
Dr. Ambrose has conducted professionally across the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. His interpretations have earned the enthusiastic praise of many leading composers including Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett, Michael Colgrass and John Harbison. Dr. Ambrose is considered an authority on Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark piece Pierrot Lunaire, having conducted it several times in three different countries. He has conducted over two dozen premiere performances including works by Michael Colgrass, Jonathan Newman, Joel Puckett, Christopher Theofanidis and Joseph Turrin. In addition, a recent performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms under his direction has been given repeated airings on Georgia Public Radio.
Dr. Ambrose is founder and music director of the Atlanta Chamber Winds a professional dectet specializing in the promotion of music by emerging composers as well as lesser-known works of established composers. Their premiere compact disc, Music from Paris, was released in 2009 on the Albany Records label and has received outstanding reviews in both Fanfare and Gramophone magazines.
As a guitarist, Robert Ambrose has performed in dozens of jazz ensembles, combos, rock bands and pit orchestras. His rock band “Hoochie Suit,” formed with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, received rave reviews throughout the Chicago area and performed for such distinguished guests as Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim.
Dr. Ambrose currently serves as director of bands, associate professor of music and associate director of the School of Music at Georgia State University, a Research I institution of 32,000 students located in Atlanta, GA. As director of bands he conducts the Symphonic Wind Ensemble, maintains a highly selective studio of graduate students in the Master of Music in wind band conducting degree program, and oversees a large, comprehensive band program comprised of four concert ensembles and three athletic bands. He lives in Peachtree City, GA with his wife Sarah Kruser Ambrose, a professional flute player, and daughters Isabelle and Hannah.
Marie Sumner Lott
Musicologist Marie Sumner Lott joined the faculty of Georgia State University in 2012; she teaches graduate and undergraduate music history classes in the School of Music. Her research investigates the musical culture of nineteenth-century Europe. Dr. Sumner Lott’s book The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music (University of Illinois Press, 2015) illuminates the relationships between innovations in the publication, performance, and composition of chamber music by well known composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, as well as their less familiar contemporaries. In addition to several essays in book-length collections published by Cambridge University Press, Orpheus Editions, and the University of Rochester Press, she has published articles and reviews in peer-reviewed journals such as Ad Parnassum, the Journal of Musicological Research, and MLA Notes. Her 2012 article on Brahms’s Op. 51 string quartets, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (U.K.), won the Deems Taylor Award for outstanding writing about concert music given annually by the American Society of Composers, Artists, and Publishers. Dr. Sumner Lott completed her Ph.D. in musicology at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) in 2008; she also holds a Master of Music degree in music history from the University of Northern Colorado and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including most recently the 2016-17 Provost’s Faculty Fellowship to support work on her second book, Imagining the Middle Ages in Nineteenth-Century Music: Romantic Medievalism Beyond Wagner.