Saturday In The Arts is a weekly look at a personality, place, trend or topic of interest to the Quad-Cities. It runs every Saturday morning on your site for fun, free, local entertainment and features, QuadCities.com. Ludwig van Beethoven was not an easy person to like in real life, but 250 years after his birth, the monumental musical genius is easy to love and admire with a jaw-dropping sense of awe. He’s a protean superhero who had to overcome so much adversity, and is being justly celebrated in the Quad-Cities and around the world. The Quad City Symphony Orchestra titled this 2020-21 season... Read More

A maid’s song in Jacob Bancks’s new opera “Karkinos” has painfully relevant lyrics – “Slowly, slowly, what is your hurry? Little by little the bird builds a nest. Patience obtains all things. Sooner or later a seedling will climb. Wait, and all that has life will flourish in time.” Patience is certainly what we all need in the Covid era, as the premiere of “Karkinos” – a collaboration between the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and Living Proof Exhibit – again has been delayed, until February 2022. The opera, penned by Bancks (an Augustana associate professor of music), was first... Read More

In the face of invisible, insidious diseases that impact hundreds of thousands of people, Living Proof Exhibit (LPE) uses the arts to offer hope and inspiration. Since it was founded 10 years ago, the Quad-Cities nonprofit has provided therapeutic benefits of the arts to people affected by cancer, in a wide variety of settings and media. One of its latest projects is being postponed by the current coronavirus pandemic. In a partnership with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) and Augustana-based composer Jacob Bancks, Living Proof is rescheduling the world premiere of the commissioned opera... Read More