Twilight Concert

Internationally renowned pianist Dr Donna Coleman celebrates the 150th birthday of American composer Charles Ives with a rare performance of his Piano Sonata No.1 at Christ Lutheran Church, 1701 Arryoy Chamiso Road, Santa Fe on Thursday evening 26th September at 6:00 p.m.

Charles Ives was born in Danbury CT on 20th October 1874. His music weaves elements from such “vernacular” sources as hymntunes, folksongs, and patriotic songs into grand Post-Romantic works that trace lineage via the so-called “cultivated” compositional tradition back to Johann Sebastian Bach. Piano Sonata No.1 is the first half of the composer’s musical autobiography. Chockablock with hymn tunes, we imagine the early years of Ives’s life when he played organ at church (as a teenager, he was regarded as the best organist in the state of Connecticut) and accompanied the “let-out” singing at camp meetings, vividly portrayed in the sonata’s second and fourth movements, which also demonstrate Ives’s familiarity with the Ragtime tradition that evolved through the second half of the Nineteenth Century.

The performance of Piano Sonata No.1 will be preceded by demonstrations of the quoted material and of Ives’s transformation of it in this brilliant evocation of rural Americana at the end of the Romantic age. Duration of the event approximately one hour.