The Toledo Symphony Orchestra will perform at The University of Findlay at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, as part of the 2008-09 Concert & Lecture Series, in the Winebrenner Theological Seminary. Chelsea Tipton II will conduct the orchestra, and Michael Chertock will be featured on the piano.
   
Chertock recently made his Carnegie Hall debut in a recital with clarinetist Ricardo Morales, with whom he has recorded an album of French music. Chertock has toured Asia with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops, Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and violinist Alyssa Park.
   
In his sixth season as resident conductor of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, American conductor Chelsea Tipton II continues to win over audiences and critics alike and to promote emerging African American and Hispanic artists in classical music.
   
This year also marks Tipton’s sixth season with the Sphinx Competition and the Sphinx Chamber Orchestra (SCO). Tipton easily connected with the founder’s vision “to create as much diversity in classical music as possible and to level the classical playing field by transforming America’s overwhelmingly white orchestras into a more accurate reflection of the country’s population as a whole.”
   
Guest-conducting engagements this season have taken him to Chicago in December for the Chicago Sinfoniettta’s Holiday Concert. This month, Tipton will conduct the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s 20th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute Concert. In March, he will be on the podium for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Patty Austin and Ella Fitzgerald Tribute, and in April with the Tulare County Symphony in California.
   
The concert is sponsored, in part, by both Marathon Petroleum Co. LLC and Whirlpool Corp. 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.