This is the last week of the season at Juilliard and the school will be thrumming with activity. Check out the events below! For Juilliard’s calendar, click here.

Artist Diploma Recital: Duo L&L

Monday, May 20 at 8:00 PM

Paul Hall at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

Duo L&L (cellist Lionel Cottet and pianist Louis Schwizgebel) perform Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas in F Major, G Minor, A Major, C Major, and D Major for their Artist Diploma Recital. The Artist Diploma performers constitute the few highly gifted and experienced musicians selected to develop their artistry and professionalism in the ever-changing contemporary world

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D54101690

Senior Dance Showcase

Monday, May 20 at 8:00 PM

Peter Jay Sharp Theater at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

Featuring Juilliard Dance’s Class of 2013 in a diverse program of solos and duets choreographed by these graduating dancers, as well as alumni and faculty, plus selections from major repertory

FREE; limited standby admission only; line forms at 7:00 PM

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D43175778

Wednesdays at One: Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Ensembles

Wednesday, May 22 at 1:00 PM

Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway)

Juilliard students share their talent with the community in these free one-hour lunchtime concerts on Wednesday afternoons throughout the season

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D43175781

Elliott Carter Memorial

Wednesday, May 22 at 5:00 PM

Peter Jay Sharp Theater at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

The Juilliard School pays tribute to beloved American composer, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and former faculty member Elliott Carter (1908-2012)

FREE; limited standby admission only; line forms at 4:00 PM

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D69015812

Juilliard Orchestra Commencement Concert

Thursday, May 23 at 6:00 PM

Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway)

It’s a Juilliard tradition that the final orchestra concert of the season features and ensemble comprised of graduating musicians, attended by their family and friends. The Juilliard Orchestra welcomes New York Philharmonic Assistant Conductor Case Scaglione to lead Brahms’ joyous Academic Festival Overture and Dvořák’s celebrated Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”

FREE; limited standby admission only; line forms at 5:00 PM

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D56842967

108^th Juilliard Commencement Ceremony Live Stream

Friday, May 24 at 11:00 AM

Live web stream at Juilliard.edu/live

Honorees and 281 (122 undergraduate, 159 graduate) graduating actors, dancers, musicians, and playwrights receive their degrees from Juilliard President Joseph W. Polisi. The ceremony features musical interludes performs by Juilliard students and faculty members, and award-winning actress and Juilliard alumna Laura Leggett Linney gives the Commencement Address. Those receiving honorary degrees include legendary pianist Alfred Brendel, three-time Academy Award and four-time BAFTA award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, choreographer and Juilliard alumnus Ohad Naharin, Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophonist and National Medal of the Arts recipient Sonny Rollins, four-time Grammy Award-winning soprano Dawn Upshaw, and philanthropists Harriet Heyman and Michael Moritz, whose recent generous gift of $5 million supports Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program (MAP)

No public tickets available; available to the public via live web stream only

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D70063752

Juilliard String Quartet Seminar Recitals

Friday, May 24 at 3:30 PM and 7:30 PM

Paul Hall at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)
Quartets from around the globe are coached by members of the world-renowned Juilliard String Quartet. This year’s participants include the Aeolus Quartet (recently named Juilliard’s 2013-2014 graduate quartet-in-residence), the Aïzuri Quartet, the Rosco Quartet, the Centre Street Quartet, the PUBLIQuartet, and the Kubrick Quartet, performing selected works by Beethoven, Bartók, Debussy, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Nielsen, Schnittke, and Schubert

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D43175782

Pre-College Symphony

Saturday, May 25 at 1:00 PM

Peter Jay Sharp Theater at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

Conductor George Stelluto leads the Pre-College Symphony in a program featuring Rossini’s Overture to La Cenerentola, Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 33 with cellist Anne Richardson, and Stravinsky’s 1945 version of The Firebird

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D43175779

Pre-College Orchestra

Saturday, May 25 at 8:00 PM

Peter Jay Sharp Theater at The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

Conductor Adam Glaser leads the Pre-College Orchestra in a program featuring Copland’s El Salón México, Weber’s Bassoon Concerto with bassoonist Harrison Miller, and Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D43175780

Juilliard Events return in September for the 2013-2014 season! Visit events.juilliard.edu for previews and updates over the summer!

Upper West Sider Jane McIntosh has been visiting a statue in Riverside Park at about 60th street for almost a year and taking pictures with it in various outfits. The statue, called Watching Upon the Present was built out of stainless steel, aluminum, iron and stone by Sequoyah Aono, an Italian-born artist who was raised in Japan but now lives in New York.

McIntosh tells us that the public art project has been a source of happiness.

“[I]n a year of personal challenges I found my creative process with ‘Marisol’ as I have privately come to call her, has been rather beautiful.”

Check out lots more photos on the project’s facebook page here.

If you want to check out the statue, you’ll have to act fast. McIntosh says it’s supposed to be removed as of May 21.

Two new art exhibits have recently landed on the Upper West Side like a massive cupcake that you can’t eat.

The West Side Arts Coalition is showcasing photos curated by Jack Cesareo, and the arts coalition is holding a poetry reading on Sunday from 2:30 to 3:30 and photo meetup on Sunday from 4 to 5:30 at the Coalition at Broadway Mall Community Center, on Broadway at 96th Street. The show is open until May 19. Gallery hours are Wednesday 6 to 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 12 to 6 pm.

The Bard Graduate Center at 18 West 86th street has a big show called Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Focusing on a remarkable but little-known collection that entered the Metropolitan Museum as a gift of J. Pierpont Morgan in the early twentieth century the exhibition features more than 200 objects of primarily medieval art and French eighteenth-century paneling, furniture, metalwork, textiles, paintings, and sculpture, as well as late nineteenth-century art pottery, most of which have rarely been viewed since the 1950s. The fourth in a series of collaborations between The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the BGC, the exhibition provides the first comprehensive examination of Georges Hoentschel—a significant figure in the history of collecting—and illuminates an understudied and critical chapter of the Metropolitan’s history.” Admission is $7 for adults, $5 for students and seniors (Thursday nights after 5 are free). Gallery hours are Tuesday-Sunday 11 am to 5 pm, and Thursday 11 to 8 pm. More here.

See, New Jersey can look beautiful in the right light. Photo from Riverside Park around 70th street on Wednesday night courtesy of Tali Blankfeld of Picture Me in NYC.

Our second annual Upper West Side photo contest is coming up, so get your cameras ready! Check out the results of last year’s contest. This year, we expect more prizes, more votes, more photos and more pizzazz!

By Michelle Hill

Meet Cecelia Shoemaker, born in Spokane, Washington. Drawn with oil pastel.

When did you move to NYC?

I moved to NYC in 1972, right out of college. I had had a scholarship for singing and acting, so of course I wanted to come to New York.  My first apartment was at 222 West 72^nd St above the Famous Dairy Restaurant.  I would see Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara there, so of course for a kid from Spokane, Washington that was thrilling!

The neighborhood was very dangerous, a woman did not go out at night alone, and you certainly did not get on a subway by yourself at night.  If you did either you were considered adventurous!

Did you always live on 72^nd St?

Then I moved to West 56^th Street, sharing a studio with another young woman who also had performing aspirations. There was a topless bar across the street where there is now a McDonald’s!  My dates would always say, “ What is a nice girl like you living on the West Side?”  A proper young woman was supposed to live on the East Side!

Because of the crime, NYC seemed confining, so I moved to Boston and lived there for a year and a half before moving to San Francisco for graduate school where I obtained my Masters in Broadcast Communications.  During the time that I lived in Boston and San Francisco, I enjoyed both cities, but I realized that they were not New York.  So in 1980 I returned.

Then I lived for a while in a sublet on East 74^th. My back windows faced the walls of the Whitney museum, it was very dark.  I remember coming home one day, and some pigeons had built a nest on the windowsill.  I developed a respect for them, they are wonderful parents!  I was depressed to return home one day to find that they and the little ones had moved on.

I have been in my apartment here for about 26 years.  It started out as what I thought was a legal sublet, but it wasn’t.  To make a long story short, the person I was dealing with was a very unsavory man.  At one point he threatened me and my lawyer, then repeated the threats on the phone to me.  I told him, “You have made a very grave mistake, you never threaten a country girl.  I am a dangerous element, because I am not afraid to die.  I come from nothing, I’ve got nothing, and I’ve got nothing to lose!”  I was tired of being pushed around in New York.  I am in this apartment today.

Why did you move to NYC?

I originally came here to be an actress and singer, which I did for a while, but I realized that for me, I needed more stability.  After graduate school, I worked in public relations and then marketing for many years, which involved long, long hours. I felt as though I had no personal life, so I decided to look for an opportunity to be self-employed.  I became an electrologist, which is permanent hair removal.  It has allowed me the freedom to travel and do freelance work.

What do you miss about the old Upper West Side?

I miss the funkiness, it seems so sterile now, with less diversity.  I understand that a survey was done a few years ago and it revealed that most of the residents of the UWS are wealthy and white.  We have paid a very dear price for safety.  There is no longer a community of artists, and I don’t think the city understands that this is what feeds the soul of a city.

More and more young people, from all different fields are leaving the city because they do not know how to raise a family here without making enormous amounts of money.  When are we going to realize that there has to be the creation of more middle income housing?  When you squeeze out the middle and working class, you no longer have a viable, interesting city.

Michelle Hill began her professional artist career at the age of 9 in the small town of Branchville, New Jersey painting the store windows in exchange for milk shakes and jawbreakers. At the age of 19, she moved into a 2 bedroom rent stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side to attend Parson’s School of Design. She now lives in that same apartment building with her husband and 2 kids 25 years later. Her illustration clients include the Village Voice, Scholastic Books, and Highlight Magazine.

Canadian singer Michael Bublé performed a song in the subway station at 66th street Thursday morning, had it filmed, and then advertised it as an impromptu event on YouTube. He’s using it to promote his new album, “To Be Loved.”

“Singing in the New York subway is something that’s been done for years and years, and I feel like it’s the most authentic, organic way to make music,” he told a Yahoo music blog. The video, though, doesn’t feel very authentic. It’s rare to have a full microphone set and hire an a capella group for an impromptu performance, isn’t it?

Anyway, does this guy do it for you? To me, he’s just trying too hard to be Sinatra, and no one can really match up to Ol’ Blue Eyes. But hey, Bublé has sold about 30 million records, so he’s clearly connecting. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Central Park will be hopping this summer, as Summerstage will bring dozens of concerts, movies and comedy events — most of them free — to the main stage on 69th street near 5th avenue and other venues.

The program was just released and there’s something for everyone: Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls on June 17 (not free), the Blue Note Jazz festival on June 24 featuring Yasiin Bey (formerly  known as Mos Def), a Comedy Central showcase on June 26, the Metropolitan Opera in the park on July 16 and many more. Check out the full listings below (click through for descriptions), or go to the Summerstage site here.

Photo of Angelique Kidjo at SummerStage by heartonastick.

Check out some exciting performances this week at Juilliard.

Composition Concert

Monday, April 22 at 8:00 PM
Paul Hall – The Juilliard School (155 W 65th Street)
A concert featuring new works by Juilliard student composers
FREE; no tickets required
http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D41481931

Wednesdays at One: Juilliard Percussion

Wednesday, April 24 at 1:00 PM
Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway)
Juilliard students share their talent with the community in these free hour-long lunchtime concerts on Wednesday afternoons
throughout the season
FREE; no tickets required
http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D51558931

Masaaki Suzuki Conducts J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor

Saturday, April 27 at 3:00 PM
St. Thomas Church (1 W 53rd Street)
Juilliard Historical Performance joins Maestro Masaaki Suzuki and Yale in a performance of J.S. Bach’s monumental Mass in B Minor
for their annual collaboration
Tickets $35-95, available by calling (212) 664-9360 or online at saintthomaschurch.org
http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D42139461

Chelsea and the old museums aren’t the only places to see art in this city! Check out some local art shows in the neighborhood this month.

Upper West Sider Naomi Davies, who painted the image above, has 11 paintings hanging at St. Agnes Library on Amsterdam between 81st and 82nd streets through April 30.

Angelo Romano, originally of Madrid, is hanging a show this month at the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew on 86th street and West End Avenue. “Madrid-born Angelo Romano’s vibrant mixed media works range from traditional paintings on canvas and paper to elaborate three-dimensional creations using found and recycled objects, including pennies and tennis rackets. The Upper West Side-based self-taught artist recently donated nearly 150 of his diverse works, most on spiritual themes and many incorporating his signature angels, to the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where they are on display in three rooms and several hallways. St. Paul & St. Andrew will celebrate this generous donation with a reception for the artist on Sunday April 21, from 5 to 7 p.m. The free event is open to the public; children are welcome.”

Nicholas Pollack has his photos of the Bronx River up in the Aish Center at 313 West 86th street until May 20. The gallery is open Mondays from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m. and Tuesday and Thursday from 11 until 5.

Juilliard presents a wide array of music this week, but the concerts listed below all have one simple price: Free! Click on the links below the listings for more information about each event. For Juilliard’s calendar, click here.

Juilliard Jazz Ensembles

Tuesday, April 16 at 8:00 PM

Paul Hall – The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

The Juilliard Jazz Ensembles, coached by faculty members Frank Kimbrough and Xavier Davis, perform original student-composed works that highlight the unique musical and compositional styles created within the Juilliard Jazz Division

FREE tickets available at the Juilliard Box Office

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D42139448

Juilliard Lab Orchestra

Wednesday, April 17 at 12:30 PM

Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway)

Part of Juilliard’s Wednesdays at One series—note earlier start time! Juilliard students share their talent with the community in these free hour-long lunchtime concerts on Wednesday afternoons throughout the season

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D60061134

PianoScope: The Late Works of Johannes Brahms

Wednesday, April 17 at 4:00 PM

Paul Hall – The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

Juilliard pianists perform Brahms’ Klavierstücke, Opp. 116, 117, 118, and 119

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D61245056

Juilliard Songbook: First-Year Singers

Wednesday, April 17 at 8:00 PM

Paul Hall – The Juilliard School (155 W 65^th Street)

First-year singers from the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts perform song repertoire in recital with faculty pianists from the Marcus Institute and the Collaborative Piano Department

FREE; no tickets required

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D52621183

James Gaffigan Conducts the Juilliard Orchestra

Saturday, April 20 at 8:00 PM

Alice Tully Hall (1941 Broadway)

American conductor and NYC native James Gaffigan leads the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of the last of Mahler’s symphonies inspired by German folk poetry, Wunderhorn. Built around the central song melody “Das himmlische Leben” (“Heaven’s Life,” sung in the final movement by Juilliard soprano Mary Feminear), Symphony No. 4 expresses the view of heaven from the innocent and imaginative perspective of a child. This program also features Juilliard violinist Sirena Huang performing Bartók’s virtuosic Violin Concerto No. 2

FREE; standby line forms at 7:00 PM

http://events.juilliard.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D44016325