The Toledo Symphony Orchestra will perform a pops concert at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 21, in the Winebrenner Theological Seminary as part of The University of Findlay’s 2009-2010 Concert & Lecture Series.

The concert is sponsored and made possible, in part, by gifts from A.R. and Mary Ann Charnes, Fifth Third Bank of Northwest Ohio and Patricia A. and Harold “Herk” Wolfe.

General admission is $25; faculty and staff admission is $15; non-UF student admission is $10; and UF student admission is free. For tickets, call the UF Box Office at 419-434-5335.            

The performance will include a variety of pieces, such as “Hedwig’s Theme from the Harry Potter Movies” by Williams, “Overture to Don Giovanni” by Mozart, “Rhapsody in Blue” by Gershwin and several other pieces.            

Robert Mirakian will conduct the orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt will be a featured pianist.            

At home both on the orchestra stage and in the opera pit, Mirakian is a passionate advocate for music. Now in his third season as music director of the Richmond Philharmonic in Richmond, Va., Mirakian is continuing the orchestra’s long history of artistic excellence and community involvement, which has resulted in both larger audiences and the awarding of two National Endowment for the Arts project grants to the orchestra.

He is currently interim director of the University of Toledo Symphony Orchestra and lives in Toledo with his wife, Ashley.

Mirakian holds a master of music degree from the University of Illinois and is completing a doctorate at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. A cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, Mirakian distinguished himself as a Senior Fellow and Presidential Scholar while serving as music director of the Dartmouth Chamber Orchestra and establishing the school’s first summer orchestra.

Pratt is acclaimed by audiences and critics alike for his musical insight and intensely involving performances. In 1992, Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and two years later was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

He continues to perform recitals throughout the U.S. including performances at the Lincoln Center in New York and Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Pratt is the artistic director of the Next Generation Festival, a two-week chamber music festival in Lancaster, Pa., tours with the Daedalus String Quartet and appears with cellist Zuill Bailey in duo recitals nationwide.

Pratt is an associate professor of piano and artist in residence at the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.