Grand Valley State University will open the annual Fall Arts Celebration on Monday with the Music Department’s feature, “A Night in Hapsburg Vienna: From the Marriage of Figaro to Fidelio as arranged for Wind Harmonie.”

This performance of original arrangements of operas by Mozart, Rossini and Beethoven will be held at the Louis Armstrong Theatre in the Performing Arts Center Monday at 8 p.m.

This novel arrangement calls for a harmonie, or octet comprised of wind instrumentalists and a collection of spoken word narrations and solo voices.

Most of the pieces, including “The Barber of Seville,” “Don Giovanni” and “Magic Flute,” will sound familiar to audience members, although this specific arrangement and presentation will be unique.

The music department will present the concert in a way similar to how the public would hear operas as they were originally written, recreating the sounds of an 18th century opera hall with the best of modern instruments.

The concert will kick off the university’s annual Fall Arts Celebration, which highlights artistic achievements across disciplines, both from inside and outside the university.

“The Fall Arts Celebration is something we have done for a number of years now,” said Henry Matthews, director of Galleries and Collections for GVSU Art Gallery. “It started when we realized we plan many artistic events in the fall, so we decided to group them together as a festival.”

The Fall Arts Celebration will conclude with “Gloria: Music of the Holiday Season from Grand Valley” on Dec. 10.

The celebration encompasses several disciplines of art, including dance, music, painting, poetry and sculpture.

Matthews said another banner event will be the photography exhibit, “Atre Argentino Actual/Contemporary Argentine Art.” This exhibition will feature 57 photographs titled “Imagine Buenos Aries.” Twelve young photographers contributed to the collection using their home cities as focal points. The exhibit will open on Oct. 6 in the Art Gallery of the PAC.

“When planning the schedule we try to include not only Grand Valley students and staff,” Matthews said. “We want to bring in our students and faculty but we also want to include the West Michigan community also.”

One of the events that feature a presenter from outside Michigan will be an ethics lecture titled, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to do?” from author and Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, whose ethics class is available free to the public and has drawn thousands of students from across the country.

Sandel will be speaking in the L.V. Eberhard Center in the Pew Campus on Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. The discussion will be followed by a reception and book signing.

The remaining headlining events of the celebration include poetry readings by two award-winning poets and a Spanish dance program featuring flamenco music.

The venues will vary for different events, with events spread between the Allendale and Pew campuses in addition to several off-campus locations.

All events in the Fall Arts Celebration are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule of events, visit www.gvsu.edu/fallarts.

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