Fisher Center at Bard

Bard’s music scholars and historians explore the life, career, and cultural legacy of German composer, conductor, and pianist Friedrich Gernsheim, whose works were largely suppressed by the Nazi regime owing to his Jewish heritage. Panelists will include Gernsheim scholar Enrique Lombrozo, TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein, musicologist Peter Laki, and Amanda Ruppenthal Stein, musicologist at Carroll University and writer/editor for the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at UCLA.

The TŌN Chamber Players and TŌN pianist Francis Chung-Yang Huang perform two works that composer Friedrich Gernsheim premiered himself in the late 1800s. Piano Quartet No. 3 is an exhilaratingly lyrical work that was first heard in Bonn, Germany in 1883, while the Second Piano Quintet, completed in 1896, is at turns brooding, lyrical, and highly romantic.

This concert features the TŌN Chamber Players spotlighting two of Friedrich Gernsheim’s most Romantic chamber works for strings: the passionate and elegiac String Quartet No. 2, which displays some Brahmsian influence; and the lively and lyrical String Quintet No. 2, one of the composer’s final works before his death in 1916.