music

chamber music ~

PORTRAITS & SELF-PORTRAITS

Featuring three pianists graduating from Bainbridge High School in the class of 2009

January 18, 2009
Sunday @ 3:00 p.m.

Tickets
$15 for adults, and $10 for seniors, students, youth, military, and teachers

Bainbridge Performing Arts’ January Chamber Music concert, Portraits & Self-Portraits begins with six works for piano solo by Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, and Gershwin, as well as Islander Sarah Rimkus, and features three pianists graduating from Bainbridge High School in the class of 2009. In each work, we will imagine the composer using a variety of audible “brushstrokes” to announce who he or she is.

In 1824, the 15-year-old Wunderkind Felix Mendelssohn’s calling card is his now famous Rondo Capriccioso in E Major, Opus 14.

In 1830-31, the young Frédéric Chopin, still living out of a suitcase in Paris, offers snapshots of his Romantic sensibility and his devotion to the doomed vision of a Poland free of Russian occupation in his Nocturne in B-flat Minor (published as Opus 9, no. 1) and “Revolutionary” Étude in C Minor (Opus 10, no. 12).

More than sixty years later, Johannes Brahms, in the second Intermezzo of his Opus 118, can be imagined fondly looking back along a corridor once full of the activities of his beloved friends Robert and Clara Schumann and their numerous children. We will hear what artistic profile the already famous Broadway composer, George Gershwin, presents in the first of his Three Preludes of 1926. College-bound Sarah Rimkus will present one of her own freshly minted compositions.

The program concludes with the Trio for Violin, Violoncello & Piano, Opus 70, no. 2, of Ludwig van Beethoven (1808). Rather than being in any sense “about” Beethoven, this music opens up a vast space shaped by the free, all-embracing spirit of Beethoven’s Ideal Human, a vision to which the composer turned repeatedly after 1805, as he became reconciled to his own personal isolation and absolutely confident in the transforming power of music—his music.

In addition to Ms. Rimkus, the piano soloists are Donna Adele Horning and Laetitia Lehman-Pearsall. The Beethoven trio will be performed by violinist Thomas Monk, cellist Barbara Deppe and pianist James Quitslund.

BPA’s January 18 and March 22 Chamber Music programs both feature performances by young Island musicians including Donna Adele Horning and Laetitia Lehman-Pearsall, who have participated in the Bainbridge Performing Arts music program since they were in grade school and now are preparing to leave for college. Adult musicians include mezzo-soprano Barbara Hume performing Rorem’s settings of poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and others.