St. Mary’s College of Maryland Musician-in-Residence Brian Ganz will continue his popular “PianoTalk” series on Wednesday, April 12 at noon in the Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary’s Hall on the college campus. Mr. Ganz will be joined by Beverly Babcock in a reprisal of last September’s performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major. The program is free and open to the public. For more information call (240) 895-4498 or visit https://dev.smcm.edu/events/organizer/music-department/.
“Beethoven’s 4th Concerto may well be the greatest work for soloist and orchestra ever composed,” Ganz recently stated. “In this PianoTalk we’ll take a look at a few reasons why that’s so,” he continued, “and I’ll share a few things I’ve learned about the concerto since last September. And of course it’s always a joy to play with my wonderful colleague Beverly Babcock. She’ll play the piano reduction of the orchestra part.” Ganz will perform Beethoven’s masterpiece later this month with the Waco Symphony under the direction of music director Stephen Heyde.
Ganz has appeared as soloist with such orchestras as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the National Philharmonic, the Baltimore and the National Symphonies, the City of London Sinfonia, and L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo. He has performed in many of the world’s major concert halls and has played under the baton of such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Jerzy Semkow and Yoel Levi. A critic for La Libre Belgique wrote of Ganz’s work: “We don’t have the words to speak of this fabulous musician who lives music with a generous urgency and brings his public into a state of intense joy.”