Jarred Dunn will take the stage of the Matsqui Centennial Auditorium on Friday, February 21, at 7:30 p.m. to bring the fourth concert in 2024-25 season of the Valley Concert Society.
The entire second half of the program will be taken up with Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in F# minor.
Publishing it in 1835, he gave it the heading, “Pianoforte Sonata, dedicated to Clara by Florestan and Eusebius.” Those were two names that he gave to two contrasting sides of his personal character. Florestan was the extroverted and impulsive side of Schumann; Eusebius was introspective and dreamy.
The sonata is a compositional masterpiece. It is carefully constructed with a unifying motif that appears throughout the work. At the same time, both of Schumann’s characters are on full display in the dramatic contrasts we see throughout.
They are most evident in the two short middle movements. The second movement is all Eusebius. It is based on a song that he composed in his youth for a poem entitled To Anna. Florestan snaps us out of our contemplative mood as the quirky third movement leaps about playfully.
Jarred Dunn’s challenge as a pianist is to present us with a rendition that can find the unity in the piece while doing justice to the contrasts that appear within the long first and fourth movements as well.
I expect that he will be up to the task. There was an interesting anecdote in the radio program he narrated on Saturday* in which he shared the experience of working through two opposing interpretations of a piece with a collaborative musician. It is this approach that he will need to call on for the Schumann sonata.
Tickets for this concert are available online at www.valleyconcertsociety.com at $32 for adults/seniors and $20 for students. For more information, call 604-289-3377.
John Wiebe - President
The Valley Concert Society
* A reference to this PS from my last email.
Some of you may have heard Jarred Dunn on CBC Radio Two on Saturday morning. He hosted the program This Is My Music at 9:00 a.m. In it he shared music that formed him and has been important to him or that he simply loves. If you missed it and would like to hear it, you can find it online at https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-382-this-is-my-music.