Recital at Dixon Hall, Tulane University for the Crescent City Chamber Music Festival – New Orleans, LA

For more information on the Crescent City
Chamber Music Festival, please click here.

Pre-Concert Talk: 7 PM
Concert: 7:30 PM

Restoration and Renewal

New Orleans is one of the great cities of the world, and one with which we all associate the themes of restoration and renewal.  As we approach the end of the tenth year since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, we are continually reminded of these themes in the incredible recovery and rebirth we have seen in New Orleans.  For this program, we will explore works whose stories also capture the essence of these themes.  Johannes Brahms, who by 1890 had long been the world’s most famous and respected composer, had lived an emotionally turbulent life, and had largely withdrawn from society.  Even so, as he composed his second string quintet, his intended final composition, he mustered every ounce of drama, pathos, and joy he had at his command to create one of his most impressive works.  Franz Schubert composed his F minor Fantasia for four-hands piano in the final year of his life, both as a way of coping with a spurning of affection by his pupil and as a tribute to her.  Its melancholy, brooding character combines with an ingenious, fluid construction that belies the youth of its composer.  Ernest Chausson, who also died young, had premonitions that this would happen, and only hoped that before it did he would have “made something of himself.”  It was with his sumptuous Concerto, Op. 21 that he found his greatest professional triumph and left his most lasting mark on the music world.  It is a work now considered to be the absolute pinnacle of Romantic French chamber music.

Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897)
String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111 (1890)

Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
Fantasia in F minor, D. 940 (1828)

Intermission

Ernest Chausson (1855 – 1899)
Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet in D major, Op. 21 (1891)

Manhattan Chamber Players

Molly Carr, Viola
Josu De Solaun, Piano
Luke Fleming, Viola
Francisco Fullana, Violin
 Caroline Goulding, Violin
Andrew Janss, Cello
Anna Petrova, Piano
Brendan Speltz, Violin