Music scholars from across the country will combine with those from Boston University tonight, converging on the School for the Arts to kick off a three-day festival exploring the music of classical composer Johannes Brahms.
The Brahms Music Festival aims to better the understanding performers have about his music. This added knowledge, said Festival Director and Chairman of the Musicology Department at the School for the Arts John Daverio, will enhance their performances.
“It is an opportunity to bring together professors, student performers and musicologists who specialize in Brahms,” Daverio said. “It’s an opportunity to get these groups to cooperate and learn how understanding the history of a person can help a performance.”
Brahms was a German Romantic composer who developed his own rhythmic originality and emotional intensity, while using classical forms. Daverio said he created the festival to bring together two groups that would otherwise never interact.
“The idea came from me because I’m a musicologist, and I specialize in Brahms. We should interact with performers. It’s two separate groups who don’t talk but should get together,” Daverio said.
The three-day festival will include public performances and lectures from people who specialize in the life and works of Brahms, combined with workshops where specialists are expected to work with student ensembles. Admission to all events is free and open to the public.
The program begins tonight at 8 p.m. in the Tsai Performance Center with performances by mezzo-soprano Amy Schneider, baritone William Sharp, violinists Bayla Keyes and Yuri Mazurkevich, and pianists Maria Clodes-Jaguaribe, Robert Merfeld and Sheila Kibbe.
Friday morning, the first workshop on “Temporality in the Piano Pieces, Opus 118” will be hosted by guest speaker David Epsterin from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A symposium will follow on “Performing the Piano Music” at 1 p.m., during which keynote speakers George Bozarth of the University of Washington, Calilla Cai of Kenyon College and Walter Frisch of Columbia University will speak on Brahms. The lectures will be held in the Marshall Room at the SFA.
That night, at 8 p.m., there will be a concert featuring the Boston University Women’s Chorus conducted by Ann Howard Jones, Il Han and Sheila Kibbe on piano, Eric Ruske on French horn and Daverio on violin.
Saturday will feature a symposium titled, “Questions of Genre and Performance” at 10 a.m. in the Marshall Room. The event will feature Daniel Beller-McKenna from the University of New Hampshire, David Brodbeck from the University of Pittsburgh, Marfaret Notley from the University of Texas and Daverio. A workshop on “Brahms Rehearsing Brahms: The Late Piano Trios” run by Bozarth follows the symposium.
The festival promises to be an educational experience for performers and scholars of music, Daverio said.
“It’s some of the greatest music of the 19th century and ever written,” Daverio said. “The festival will give us a better change to delve more deeply into how it should be performed.”
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