ArtsFest 2018: Musical World in a Nutshell and the Art of Piano

October 24, 2018

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded an astonishing tale, according to which another Roman great, Cicero, had seen the entire “Iliad” of Homer written on a scroll so small that it could fit inside the shell of a walnut. While not entirely plausible, the story is acknowledged as the origin of the phrase “in a nutshell”… which can be construed to mean many things.

In response to this year’s ArtsFest theme, “Art and Horizons,” faculty pianist Tony Weinstein and his wife and chamber partner Karina Avanesian, turn to horizons within to capture the nineteenth-century world of music in a nutshell through the medium of piano-four-hand on Monday, October 29 at 7:30 p.m. in the Green Center’s Thompson Recital Hall.

As part of DePauw School of Music’s Faculty Select Series, the Weinsteins will demonstrate the expanded horizons of the four-hand piano repertoire with performances of Franz Schubert’s great Fantasia in F minor, a masterpiece specifically composed to elevate a genre that had been, up to that point, seen as a pleasant diversion or an acceptable activity for a date. Brahms’s arrangement of the famous Schumann Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello, which follows, allows two players one instrument to share the interplay of the variety of colors and textures it normally takes four to produce. The pièce de rèsistance, the ultimate band-in-a-nutshell: Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy interprets the sounds of an entire orchestra through the tips of twenty fingers.

General admission to the Faculty Select Series is $5; tickets for seniors, children and all students are free. For online purchases, visit depauw.edu/music. The GCPA box office also will be open 90 minutes prior to the performance, in the Judson and Joyce Green Center for the Performing Arts (605 S. College Avenue).

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