Baylor > School of Music > Concert Information > Events Calendar > Liszt Bicentennial Concert, 9-26-11

Liszt Bicentennial Concert, 9-26-11

BAYLOR PIANO FACULTY CELEBRATE THE LISZT BICENTENNIAL

Four members of the Baylor University music faculty will perform a concert of piano music by Franz Liszt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century Hungarian composers. This bicentennial program will be presented on Monday, September 26, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Roxy Grove Hall. The actual two-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth, in the village of Raiding, will be on October 22.

The program will open with Associate Professor of Piano Brian Marks playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C-sharp minor, a composition dating from the year 1847.

Originating some fourteen years after that was what proved to be one of the composer's most enduring works, the first of his four Mephisto Waltzes. Assistant Professor of Piano Kae Hosoda-Ayer will perform this piece, which Liszt dedicated to his favorite pupil, Carl Tausig.

Associate Professor of Piano Jane Abbott-Kirk will perform next, with the remarkable "Vallée d'Obermann" from Franz Liszt's Années de pèlerinage, Première année: Suisse. The inspiration for this piece, composed around 1850, is Étienne-Jean de Senancour's Obermann, a novel which tells of the dispirited title character, whose misfortunes drive him to seek consolation in a rural area of Switzerland.

Concluding the program will be Professor of Piano Krassimira Jordan, Baylor's Artist-in-Residence, who will play Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody from 1863. This piece is based on two very familiar themes: the "Jota Aragonesa" and "La Follia de Espagna." Filled with dazzling colors, the Spanish Rhapsody is one of the most technically demanding compositions in the romantic piano repertoire.

The Franz Liszt Bicentennial Concert is free of charge and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor University School of Music at 254-710-3991.