POTSDAM -- The Crane Symphony Orchestra will perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 29, in the Helen M. Hosmer Concert Hall at SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music.

The performance will feature pianist M. Maxwell Howard, a winner of this year's student concerto competition.

The program will open with Ludwig van Beethoven's "Overture to Egmont," following Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2, first movement. After an intermission, the program will conclude with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4.

The concert is free, and the public is invited to attend.
Howard is a senior piano performance and musical studies major at The Crane School of Music, where he studies under Paul Wyse and Sonia Wheaton-Dudley. He has performed with many ensembles at Crane, including the Wind Ensemble, the concert and symphonic bands, the Crane Symphony Orchestra, the Jazz Ensemble, the Latin Ensemble and the Contemporary Music Ensemble.

In December 2010, his jazz skills brought him the great opportunity of playing in a student jazz quintet alongside Wynton Marsalis in New York City when SUNY Potsdam conferred upon him an honorary doctorate degree.