InterHarmony Concert Series: Romantic Mirrors of the Mind

Saturday, November 4th at 8PM master cellist and Founder of InterHarmony® International Music Festival Misha Quint will perform with brilliant colleagues and young artists in a gorgeous program of 18th and 19th century music he has curated. 

Mirrors are essential for knowing ourselves, the mirrors of the mind the most important; the best mirror is music to show us who we are, and of that the Romantic to expose the depths of our psyche, our worst fears, our greatest joys. 

Tickets are $40 and can be purchased by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, at at www.carnegiehall.com, or at the box office on 57th and 7th Ave.

About the Program

This concert is shaped with tempestuous changes of mood that coalesce to a transcendence of ardor and mystery. The terror of Liszt's bombast gives way to the delights of a Schubert chestnut, naïve yet of exquisite sophistication that has its own moments of darkness. An unassuming though perfect gem of an obscure song will introduce a famous aria of anguish. Salon pyrotechnics on the violin will meet the patrician warmth of Beethoven, and Brahms will own the rest of the evening, first with tranquility, then concluding with a youthful masterpiece, grand. 

About the Music

Liszt's second Ballade in B-minor is a phantasmagorical tone poem, a showcase that tests the virtuosity of the pianist, his mettle to conjure the gothic horror tale of Lenore, her midnight journey with the zombie of her slain fiancé to their wedding attended by skeletons and ghouls.

Schubert's Variation movement on a theme from the composer's most beloved song, The Trout, gives this Piano Quintet its moniker. This charming fish darts here and whither, though the storminess of the minor variation shows our fury to the cold-blooded fisherman that reels in our friend.

Carlotta Ferrari was an Italian opera composer and poet, and her song Son figliuola d'una fata (I am the daughter of a fairy) is a perfect little scena to contrast Massanet's aria Pleurez mes yeux, among the greatest plangent expressions in the French repertoire. We weep for our heroine, her obligation to take revenge on her lover that accidentally killed her father.

Saint-Saëns' Etude en Forme de Valse transcribed by Ysaÿe for violin and piano is a one whose fireworks are the sparks that fly from the diamonds of ingenués at their balls of La Belle Époque. Beethoven's Romance in F Major expresses his love with greatest dignity.

The lyric contentment of the first movement of Brahms' A Major Violin Sonata reflects the composer's mood, written during a summer's vacation in Thun, Switzerland.

Brahms' B-Major Trio, written when the composer was only twenty, overflows with the best of human feeling, through the four movements first of warmth to unbounded passion, Prussian impishness that explodes to paroxysms, a quiet intimacy of feelings of near silent holiness, topped with an unsettled mystery, in the minor, a wandering one, ending with thunderbolts. What a way to conclude this whirlwind night of such myriad facets of The Romantic! www.interharmony.com