1.7 C
Niagara Falls
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Music Niagara hosts free double bill Sunday

Richard Baker

Special to The Lake Report

This Sunday, Music Niagara continues its At Home Series with music produced by two strikingly different instruments. 

One is all touch and a mainstay of all music; the other is no touch at all, and widely unknown.

This latter instrument, the Theremin, is a fascinating electronic device invented in 1920 by a young Russian physicist, Leon Theremin, as part of the then Russian government-sponsored, and decidedly not musical, research into proximity sensors. 

It consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the player's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and volume with the other. The electric signals are then amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. 

The result is an ethereal and pure sound with a spooky quality that has been widely used in movies and television shows, recently and notably in “Midsomer Murders,” as well as in 21st-century new music and rock. The Moog synthesizer was later a byproduct.

Our performance is by Dutch thereminist Thorwald Jørgensen, one of the leading classical theremin players in the world. He has played in leading orchestras, as a chamber musician, soloist and on radio and television around  the world. His elegant, almost immobile stance and unmoved expression as he coaxes the ether into producing sound is quite remarkable to witness, and much enhanced by the immediacy of the video. 

The other instrument is, of course, the piano, this week featured in a recital by Constanze Beckmann, an artist familiar to our audience from previous appearances with Music Niagara. 

The German-born Beckmann has performed throughout Europe, Canada and Israel. She regularly plays with musicians from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, and is a sought-after collaborator for singers and string players. 

Since 2010 she also has participated in numerous projects as a pianist and curator featuring works composed by survivors as part of Holocaust Education Week. Beckmann will play three pieces: Bach's Partita No. 4 in D major; Mozart's Piano Sonata K.576 in D major and Brahms' Intermezzo No. 1 in E-Flat Major, Op. 117.

To watch Sunday's performances or find information on the 2020 season, go to Music Niagara’s new website on the day of the event at https://www.musicniagara.org/ and click on “Watch Live.” 

* Richard Baker is chair of Music Niagara's board of directors.

 

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