The Music of César Franck

Friday, December 02, 2022 @ 2:00pm

Grunin Center - Room A203
1 College Drive, Toms River, NJ 08754

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 #3: Final utterance

feat. Karin Gargone, Brian Gilmore

Friday, December 2, 2022 at 2:00 PM

This performance introduces our audience to OCC’s newest musical acquisition in our mission to serve the Ocean County musical community, a new, custom-designed two manual/full pedalboard Rogers Inspire 233 digital organ. OCC Music Chair Karin Gargone will showcase this new instrument in a performance of Franck’s last and greatest organ work, the Troisième Choral (1890). Though uniquely French, the strong debt of influence owned to Johann Sebastian Bach is ever-present in this masterwork which was significantly dedicated to Augusta Holmès.  The second part of the program will feature Franck’s Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra in a reduction for two pianos. One of Franck’s two compositions for piano and orchestra, Symphonic Variations richly explores its principle descending melody through numerous metamorphoses and incarnations of incredible lyricism and harmonic invention.