The Peabody Trio

Friends of Chamber Music will present the last concert of their 59th season this weekend at Emma Willard School, with a concert featuring the Peabody Trio.

The Peabody Trio haven’t been around quite as long as the Friends of Chamber Music, but the resident ensemble of Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory have racked up a series of awards and built an international reputation. Their program in Troy will include Beethoven’s Trio in D-major, Janacek’s “Kreutzer” sonata, Zhou Long’s Spirit of Chimes and Ravel’s Trio.

The Peabody Trio will perform Saturday (April 12) at 8 PM at Emma Willard School’s Kiggins Hall (285 Pawling Ave., Troy). Tickets are $22 general admission, and $11 for students. For more info, call 273-8135.

New Plays Festival

When the folks at Proctors opened their (relatively) new 100-seat theater space, 440 Upstairs, they emphasized their plan to utilize the space for the collaborative development of new projects. And they have been true to their word. Only four months after 440 Upstairs housed Stageworks/Hudson’s annual Play by Play festival of new one-act plays, the curtain has been raised on Proctors’ latest project, the New Plays Festival.

The festival features the premieres of three new full-length plays, which will be staged on a staggered schedule over the next three weeks. Hubbard Hall artistic director Kevin McGuire, who recently was appointed artistic director of new plays and works at Proctors Theatre, directed the first of the three productions, General Desdemona. Written by Egan Reich, General Desdemona explores the questions of nationalism, loyalty, fate and purpose through a production of Othello staged in a U.S. Army camp on the Gulf Coast in 1846.

The second two productions of the festival are opening this week. Battles of the Band (penned by local boy Kevin Dobies) follows the internal drama of a garage band trying to break into the business. 110 Flight, a two- person play by Nahal Navidar, examines the effects of 9/11 on an intimate scale, through the marriage of an Iranian-American psychology student and Irish-American New York City cop. Nine actors, three of them local, will portray all the roles in the three productions.

The New Play Festival Runs through April 27 at 440 Upstairs at Proctors (440 State St., Schenectady). Tickets for individual shows are $26; three-show packages are available for $70. For a complete schedule of showtimes, call the Proctors box office at 346-6204.

Steve Earle

In country-music land, Steve Earle is regarded as “the new Bruce Springsteen-turned-hardcore troubadour”; his rock-meets-twang music is absolutely full of political opinion and activism. His experimentation, in both his music and his lifestyle, has kept him in the spotlight for years.

Currently, his concerts bear a heightened political (Earle is a self-proclaimed socialist) message on strains of bluegrass, heavy rock, and hillbilly twang—a combination that has netted Earle 13 Grammy Award nominations. The lovely guitar-playing lady you’ll see beside him is his wife, Allison Moorer, who is also on his current album, Washington Square Seranade, performing on “Days Aren’t Long Enough.”

Moorer, sister to Shelby Lynne, is a singer-songwriter who looks notably younger standing next to her husband (she’s 35 to his 53), and is flying high on the success of her latest album, Mockingbird. The album is a collection of Moorer’s covers of songs by female singer-songwriters, and clearly echoes Earle’s influence.

Despite the fact that the two carry shadows with them (Earle of his drug-riddled former self, Moorer of her sister), they stand alone in their sometimes restless, sometimes restful sounds, reflecting off each other’s twangs and riffs.

The couple takes to the Egg (Empire State Plaza) tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 PM. Tickets are $28. For more info, call 473-1845.