The Pleasanton Chamber Players in Concert:
"The Rise of German Romanticism"

The Pleasanton Chamber Players will present a concert on Sunday, March 8, 2009, at 3:00 p.m. in the Trinity Lutheran Church at the corner of Hopyard and Del Valle in Pleasanton, CA.

The event will feature chamber music works by E.T.A. Hoffmann, H. Baermann, Weber, Liszt, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. The performers will include Cecilia Huang and Lilya Guion on violin, Micah Naler on viola, Gay Hagen Dunn and Lawrence Granger on cello, Karen Stasko Veca on flute, Gary Sears on clarinet, Dominique Piana on harp and Priscilla Carter Granger on piano.

Whereas last year's concert was centered on "The French Touch," attempting to answer the question of what qualifies music as "French," this year's concert takes a different slant in the form of an exploration of "The Rise of German Romanticism."

It is common knowledge that the very term 'Romanticism' derives from the French term for 'novel' ('roman'), intrinsically connecting all the art forms affected by this movement with literature. Especially in its early incarnation, romantic music simply departed from classicism with its attempts to portray realms of imagination and feeling. It took a lot of experimentation to bend the classical vocabulary and forms to the new "programmatic" expressions sought.

One of the first of the Romantics was the writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose fame now rests on his fantastical stories morphed into other composers' works, such as Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker or Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. What did Hoffmann's own music sound like?

Schubert, the fountainhead of German Lied, this wonderful combination of verse and music, also harbored operatic ambitions, spending a great amount of time on his failed opera, The Magic Harp. There must have been something worth hearing in the master's labor of love!

Instrumental color also proved quintessential to the romantic ethos, thus favoring the rise of virtuoso instrumentalists such as Heinrich Baermann, the favorite clarinetist of Mendelssohn and Weber. His own compositions are barely known, but given his reputation he certainly had something to say.

And Carl Maria von Weber himself, the prophet of national German opera, juxtaposes in his chamber music the same kind of haunting tunes and lively or tender country scenes as he did in his groundbreaking stage works.

The great Mendelssohn, whose 200th anniversary is celebrated this year, often wrote works on the spot for his friends, and each piece became a slice of life attesting to the conviviality behind his genius.

You are cordially invited to come and enjoy these unusual pleasures for the ear that scholarship has brought back into the fold of history. The rare scores from this less beaten path represent a crucial picture of early romantic trends. They highlight the intricate connections between musicians and society, while offering a more intimate glimpse into the composer's inner workings.

Tickets to this event are $15 in advance, $18 at the door, children free. Tickets will be available in February at Ingram and Brauns Musik Shoppe and Towne Center Books in Pleasanton, and at Fine Fretted Friends in Livermore.

For information about the Pleasanton Chamber Players, call 925-455-5333 or e-mail dominiquepiana@comcast.net.

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