ROMP 2016: Brahms Revisited
Join us Saturday, January 30, 2016 as ROMP explores the private friendships and public musical personas of composer Johannes Brahms with a concert and symposium featuring distinguished scholars Paul Berry and Marie Sumner Lott and the musicians of Chamber Music Northwest.
Funding for ROMP is made possible by the Garcetti Fund for Music.
Symposium
“Finding His Niche: Audience and Style in Brahms’s String Chamber Music”
Marie Sumner Lott, Georgia State University
Saturday, January 30, 2016
1:30 p.m., Performing Arts Building 320
Free and open to the public
Writing new music for string ensembles allowed Brahms to “try on” different compositional roles in the musical life of his day. In his quartets, quintets, and sextets for strings, we encounter three distinct personalities as the composer experimented with musical styles appropriate to specific social settings and musical consumers.
“Consolation at the Keyboard: Brahms, Clara Schumann, and the Emotional Landscapes of Musical Borrowing”
Paul Berry, Yale University School of Music
with special guest violinist Ida Kavafian
Saturday, January 30, 2016
3:30 p.m., PAB 320
Free and open to the public
Brahms’ long friendship with pianist Clara Schumann manifests in two of his best-known works: the energetic song “Meine Liebe ist grün” and the elegiac slow movement of the first Violin Sonata. Imagining how these works might have felt under Clara’s hands at the keyboard provides insight into the commingled musical and emotional landscapes shared between composer and performer.
Concert
Brahms Revisited
Chamber Music Northwest
7:30 p.m., Kaul Auditorium
Intermezzi from opp. 117 and 118 (arr. Simon Aldrich)
String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, op. 18 (arr. composer)
Serenade No. 1 in D Major, op. 11 (Reconstruction for Nonet) (arr. Alan Boustead)
Concert tickets are $10–60. Call 503/294-6400 or purchase online at cmnw.org.
Chamber Music Northwest gives the German master new context with the original versions of two works best known in larger arrangements, as well as three of the timeless piano intermezzi expanded for clarinet and string trio.
Open Rehearsal
Chamber Music Northwest
Saturday, January 30, 2016
11 a.m., Kaul Auditorium
Brahms Serenade No. 1 in D Major, op. 11
Free and open to the public
Lecturer Biographies
Paul Berry is Assistant Professor of Music History (Adjunct) at the Yale School of Music. His book, Brahms Among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion, reconstructs patterns of music making among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of new compositions. Among his awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Yale Provost’s Teaching Prize. He is also active as a tenor specializing in early music, German song, and twentieth-century music.
Marie Sumner Lott is an Assistant Professor of Music History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of a book: The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities, which explores the publication of string chamber music and performances of it by middle-class music lovers in nineteenth-century Europe. She has published several articles on the music of Brahms and his contemporaries, including an award-winning essay on Brahms’s Op. 51 string quartets.