Concert Report Essay

On Tuesday, October 15, 2013 I attended the Piano Area Fall Recital in the Carol A. Carter Recital Hall. Approaching the concert I was uncertain what to expect. My sister had learned when we were in elementary school to play the piano and I had attended multiple of her recitals, but a piano recital isn’t on the top of an elementary child’s fun list. So it had been a decade since the last recital I had attended and maturity had taken its course in my life. The recital had a handful of musicians consisting of Frederic Chopin, Erik Satie, Robert Schumann, Alexander Scriabin, Joseph Haydn, Alberto Ginastera, Gabriel Faure, Enrique Granados and Carl Maria von Weber. The GSU Piano Ensemble did a magnificent job throughout the entire concert, but final piece by Weber, Invitation to the Dance, is what made the concert worth the wait. Invitation to the Dance is a piano piece in rondo form written by Carl Maria von Weber in 1819. Weber had been married to his wife for only a few months when he wrote and dedicated Invitation to the Dance to her. The structure of the piece was very interesting to me. Like I said above the end of the piece was by far the best part. The piece was written in D-flat major. It has a slow introduction leading to a fast section, then a lilting waltz theme. Other waltz tunes appear, and the fast section, enthusiastic scale passages and the main waltz theme are all repeated. It comes to a rousing conclusion, or what sounds very much like one, then finishes with a quiet addition once more. The audience was prone to applaud at the false conclusion, believing the work was over. The recital opened my eyes significantly to the piano. Just about everyone knows the instrument, but no one knows how it became its structure or how it even produces sound. The piano was founded on earlier technological innovations. During the Middle Ages, there were several attempts at creating stringed keyboard instruments with struck strings (Pollens 1995). By the 17th century, the mechanisms of keyboard instruments such as the clavichord and the harpsichord were well known. In a clavichord the strings are struck by tangents, while in a harpsichord they are plucked by quills. Centuries of work on the mechanism of the harpsichord in particular had shown the most effective ways to construct the case, soundboard, bridge, and keyboard for a mechanism intended to hammer strings. The

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Concert Report

Concert Report

Jazz Concert Report