I'd like to cordially invite you to the Marshall University Symphony Orchestra concert on April 30 in Smith Recital Hall at 7:30 pm under the direction of Dr. Phil Vallejo.
I will be playing Mendelssohn's first piano concerto with the orchestra and am looking very much forward to performing this joyful and exhilarating music, written by the 22-year-old Felix in Rome and Munich. I performed this work once before, 25 years ago in Germany and am reliving some happy memories.
Other works on the program include Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major (St. Anne, arr. Schönberg), overtures to Nabucco (Verdi) and Tannhäuser (Wagner), and the Hungarian Dance No. 6 by Brahms.
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The first Mendelssohn piano concerto was extremely popular in the 19th century. Hector Berlioz described what happened to an Érard piano on which the concerto was too often played:
"...the piano, which is out of its mind, has no intention of paying him any heed either. He sends for holy water and sprinkles the keyboard with it, but in vain—proof that it wasn't witchcraft but merely the natural result of thirty performances of one concerto. They take the keyboard out of the instrument—the keys are still moving up and down by themselves—and they throw it into the middle of the courtyard next to the warehouse. There M. Erard, now in a fury, has it chopped up with an axe. You think that did it? it made matters worse. Each piece danced, jumped, frisked about separately—on the pavement, between our legs, against the wall, in all directions, until the warehouse locksmith picked up this bedeviled mechanism in one armful and flung it in the fire of his forge, finally putting an end of it...Such a fine instrument!"
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