Room A203 - Free, Advance Registration Required
The Friday Afternoon Recital Series is celebrating the 200th anniversary of César Franck with a series of four recitals devoted to his music. Living a fundamentally unassuming life as an organist and professor at the Paris Conservatory, in his later years Franck produced a string of profound works ripe with inspiration, passion, intellectual rigor, and lyricism. Please join us for this set of four performances exploring the masterworks of one of the unsung heroes of the late-Romantic period.
Recital #2: Franck and the piano
feat. Brian Gilmore
Friday, November 18, 2022 at 2:00 PM
The first two decades of young Cesar’s life were dominated by his father’s wish for him to be a touring virtuoso of the caliber of Franz Liszt. Though by all accounts, the young man possessed the skill and intellect for the task, it was a vision of life forced upon him; one which caused him to rebel against an extroverted life of fame and fortune in favor of the more peaceful, pious, and reclusive life of a church organist. And so away from the the piano Franck walks for the next 40 years, working as an organist and composer of well-crafted, though emotionally disconnected, sacred works. That is, until a passionate awakening of his creative powers in 1879 causes him to return to the piano as a critical means of expression. This recital explores the two large-scale piano works stemming from the final decade of Franck’s life: Prélude, Choral et Fugue and Prélude, Aria et Final.
Both fundamentally conceived as a single movement works divided into three subsections, the pages of both works convey an astonishing sense of power, invention, richness of thought, and depth of feeling all shaped within Franck’s unique style of keyboard writing that synthesizes the conflicting strata of his life: the pianistic virtuosity of his youth and the organ saturated world of his mature life. Join us for an exploration and performance of these keyboard masterworks by OCC lecturer and afternoon recital series founder, Brian Gilmore.
