Dr. Henning Vauth, an associate professor of piano at Marshall University, will perform a solo recital at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 30, in Smith Recital Hall on Marshall’s campus. It will feature the works of Schubert, Schumann, Pfitzner, Liszt, Petit and Debussy.
The concert is free and open to the public.
“The recital will feature piano music from Germany and France, the two countries I have been most closely associated with before I came to the United States,” Vauth said.
The program is a repeat performance of a recital he gave in Chicago.
“After a sunny opening with Schubert’s popular B-flat major variations based on a theme from his incidental music for the play Rosamunde, I will perform Schumann’s late and lesser-known Fantasy Pieces, Op. 111 and combine them with two virtually unknown piano pieces by Hans Pfitzner that are closely linked to Schumann’s work,” Vauth said. “The second piece, ‘Melodie,’ is a beautiful reworking of Schumann’s Romance, Op. 28 No. 2.”
The second act features four pieces from the first volume of Franz Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage, which reflects “his impressions of Switzerland after he had to leave Paris due to his scandalous affair with a married woman,” Vauth said.
“The finale will be a pair of obscure piano etudes by Pierre Petit, a Parisian composer and former director of the École Normale de Musique (a school at which I spent one wonderful year), entitled Mist and The Coffee Grinder,” Vauth said. “This will be followed by Claude Debussy’s well-known masterpiece Isle of Pleasure, inspired by Antoine Watteau’s painting Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera).”