Events

https://www.roundtable.org/live-courses/music/great-composer-pianists-mozart-beethoven-chopin-and-brahms “Kapellmeister Mozart’s…The hour of music I heard there was the happiest ever granted me. This little man and great master improvised twice…so wonderfully! so wonderfully! that I did not know where I was….He wove together the most difficult passages and the most ingratiating themes…” Mozart’s playing was regarded as simply wondrous. We examine his […]

https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/programs/manuel-de-falla-at-150Marking the 150th anniversary of pivotal 20th-century Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s birth, popular speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin combines an illustrated lecture with live piano demonstrations to bring to life a slight, almost Chaplinesque figure whose music pulses with sensuality and spiritual intensity. Deeply sensitive, devout, and more than a little superstitious, de Falla […]

https://www.roundtable.org/live-courses/music/great-composer-pianists-mozart-beethoven-chopin-and-brahms “His improvisation was most brilliant and striking. In whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break out into large sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty […]

https://www.roundtable.org/live-courses/music/great-composer-pianists-mozart-beethoven-chopin-and-brahms “The tone he could draw from the instrument, especially in cantabiles, was always immense…He gave a noble manly energy to appropriate passages with overpowering effect – energy without roughness – just as, on the other hand, he could captivate the listener through the delicacy of his soulful rendering – delicacy without affectation. For all […]

https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/programs/antonio-vivaldiAntonio Vivaldi’s music is so beloved today that it’s hard to imagine he was virtually forgotten for nearly two centuries. In his day, the fiery-haired, virtuoso violinist and Catholic priest was celebrated for his striking innovations in Baroque form, but after his death much of the work of the “Red Priest” vanished from performance. A […]

https://www.roundtable.org/live-courses/music/great-composer-pianists-mozart-beethoven-chopin-and-brahms “Brahms’ playing…was, indeed, stimulating to an extraordinary degree and so apart as to be quite unforgettable. It was not the playing of a virtuoso, though he had a large amount of virtuosity (to put it moderately) at his command. He never aimed at mere effect, but seemed to plunge into the innermost meaning of […]