By Kathy-Ann Gobin
DANBURY – The greater Danbury community is invited to enjoy the masterworks of six renowned composers featured at a piano concert at St. Joseph Church in October.
The 90-minute concert, featuring the works of Haydn, Beethoven, Shubert, Chopin, Liszt and Brahms, will be held on Saturday, October 17th at 7:30 pm in the church on Robinson Ave.
The concert is an invitation to appreciate beauty.
“There are so many ways that people come to know God and for many, the first inclination of the heart towards Him is through beauty,” said St. Joseph Pastor Father Eric Silva, noting that some of the greatest and most beautiful architectural feats can be seen in churches.
“Many walk into stunning churches around the world and the awe that they experience, moves their hearts to the truth of what that beauty is meant to highlight and point towards,” Father Silva said. “Having a concert in the church itself is far more than a nice thing to do, but it is meant to elevate one’s eyes towards the God who inspired some of history’s greatest musicians and that is our hope in having this concert at St. Joseph’s Church.”
Director of Music Robert Fertitta agreed and said he wants to share the joy and beauty of the music with others.
“My desire is to expose this probably unfamiliar material to people who want to learn something new and beautiful,” he said. “I doubt if anybody would be disappointed upon hearing these pieces, they’re stunningly gorgeous.”
“The magic of this program is how different each of the master composers sound,” Fertitta said. “They are all unique but by no means incompatible on a program. All the pieces have a key signature of four flats. They work beautifully together.”
Fertitta hopes this concert and others like it in the parish will bring a renewal of an appreciation of the classical works.
“The program covers a wide range of moods and textures,” Fertitta said.
The finale of the program will include Ballade No. 4 in F minor written by Frédéric Chopin, a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the early Romantic period who wrote primarily for solo piano.
“Chopin wrote four ballades, each of them a standalone piece,” Fertitta said. “They’re very dramatic, lyrical and at times climactic. The ballades run the gamut of emotions. I’m playing the last of them. It’s an incredible twelve-minute piece.”
The concert showcases the odyssey of classical music from Haydn in 1793 to Brahms in 1893.
“It’s always fun to know when the composers lived and when their lives overlapped,” Fertitta said, noting how they may or may not have been influenced by each other’s work which spanned close to 200 years.
“To hear a program including late 18th century works and then progress to early to middle 19th century, one gets a nice feel for the evolution of musical style,” Fertitta said.
Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer pivotal in the evolution of chamber music, and Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer, conductor and pianist who was regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras, and Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic period. Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period.
“This concert gives a nice overview of the world of classical music with its various styles and characters, but it is still very much traditional,” he said.
