Photo by Jay Mallin
St. Mary’s City- February 11 – St. Mary’s College of MD Musician-in-Residence Brian Ganz will continue his popular mid-day PianoTalk series on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, at 11:20 a.m. with a free PianoTalk featuring Fryderyk Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Op. 4.
The program, which will take place in the recital hall of the Dodge Performing Arts Center on the college campus, will begin with a discussion of this sonata, composed when Chopin was only 17 and 18 years old. Ganz will then perform the work in its entirety. For more information call (240) 895-4498 or visit Brian Ganz PianoTalk, Feb. 18 | St. Marys College of Maryland
“Chopin’s first sonata has an astonishing amount of musical richness and storytelling,” Ganz says. “Chopin’s poetic voice is beginning to emerge in this youthful work, and I will show listeners just how much evidence there is in the sonata of that emerging voice. But the real attraction for me in the sonata is Chopin’s already developed ability to tell a great story. For me, this storytelling ability would become Chopin’s ‘superpower.’ I find the last movement almost unbearably exciting as it brings the story of the sonata to its powerful climax.”
Ganz is on a quest to perform all of Fryderyk Chopin’s 240 works, and this sonata is the featured work of his next installment in that quest, to take place at the Music Center at Strathmore on February 28. That recital will be the next-to-last in the entire series, which began in 2011. “Chopin’s music is the language of my soul, and I have dreamed since childhood of someday performing all of his works,” said Ganz, who is widely regarded as one of the leading pianists of his generation. He is expected to be the first to perform every piece of music Chopin ever wrote.
On the February 18 PianoTalk Ganz will also play a short, deeply beautiful variation on a theme from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera I Puritani. Chopin’s friend and fellow pianist-composer Franz Liszt invited several luminaries of the day to contribute a variation on the theme “Suoni la Tromba” from the opera. Most of the contributions were full of pianistic fireworks and pyrotechnics. Chopin’s was characteristically understated in its depth and lyricism.
Ganz has appeared as soloist with such orchestras as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the National Philharmonic, the Baltimore and the National Symphonies, the City of London Sinfonia, and L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo. He has performed in many of the world’s major concert halls and has played under the baton of such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Jerzy Semkow and Yoel Levi.
A critic for La Libre Belgique wrote of Ganz’s work: “We don’t have the words to speak of this fabulous musician who lives music with a generous urgency and brings his public into a state of intense joy.”
