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CORVALLIS - Sisters Rachelle and Robin McCabe will perform Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra at this season's final performance of the Corvallis-OSU Symphony Orchestra. The concert begins at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 24, in LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State University campus.

The McCabe sisters have entertained Corvallis concert-goers in numerous solo and duo performances over the past 20 years.

Rachelle McCabe is the director of piano studies at OSU and maintains a busy career as a concert pianist. She has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia and England and has played solo recitals in Seattle, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Portland and Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Also a busy international concert pianist, Robin McCabe is the director of the University of Washington's School of Music. She has won numerous prizes and awards, including the International Concert Artist's Guild Competition and a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

"Robin and I love playing the Poulenc concerto," Rachelle McCabe said. "Poulenc employs all his favorite styles, moving quickly from one image to the next. At one instant we hear Parisian boulevard music and in the next, some jazz, and then, a meditation influenced by the rich sounds of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra. There are even musical references to Stravinsky and Mozart.

"All of this is presented in a lighthearted fashion as if Poulenc really just wanted to entertain his listeners," she added. "It's very fun."

The concert will also feature Mike Parker's debut performance as an orchestra narrator. Parker, OSU's "voice of the Beavers," will be featured in Benjamin Britten's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell, better known as the "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra."

Parker serves as the radio voice for OSU football, men's basketball and baseball. In 1999 and 2003, he was named by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association as the Oregon Sportscaster of the Year.

The orchestra will open the program with Beethoven's First Symphony. This work, written in 1800, is grounded in the Classical Period, says Marlan Carlson, music director, but shows hints of the unconventional style of Romanticism.

"This first symphonic work has many conventional qualities, but clearly the revolutionary iconoclast is waiting in the background," Carlson said. "In many respects, it heralds a vision of Beethoven's later, less conventional voice."

Tchaikovsky's powerful concert overture, "Romeo and Juliet," will conclude the program.

"All of the elements of Shakespeare's gripping drama are present in the music," Carlson said. "It would be difficult to name another composition that more effectively conveys the essence of this timeless story of love, deception, death and redemption."

All seats are reserved for this performance. Tickets are $20 for the general public, $10 for OSU students with identification, and are available at Gracewinds Music, Creative Crafts and Frames, and the OSU Department of Music in Corvallis, and at Sid Stevens Jewelers in Albany.

For more information, call 541-737-4061.