Audience
St. Mary's College of MD Musician-in-Residence Brian Ganz will offer his final performance of the academic year on Wednesday, April 30 at 1pm with a free PianoTalk featuring Fryderyk Chopin's 4 Mazurkas, Op. 68. The program, which will take place in the recital hall of the Dodge Performing Arts Center on the college campus, will begin with a discussion of the mazurkas, composed throughout Chopin's creative lifetime. Ganz will then perform the 4 mazurkas in their entirety. For more information call (240) 895-4498 or email musicdepartment@smcm.edu.
"Chopin composed mazurkas throughout his creative life," Ganz said. "And this set of four, published after Chopin died, exemplifies this with mazurkas from both his youth and from one of his final creative years, 1836," the pianist continued. "It is absolutely fascinating to hear the differences between the early mazurkas and the late one. Therefore, I think of this set of mazurkas as 'Chopin's Creative Bookends.'"
Ganz is on a quest to perform all of Fryderyk Chopin’s 240 works, and this set of four mazurkas was a featured work on his last installment in that quest, which took place at the Music Center at Strathmore on February 28. That recital was the next-to-last in the entire series, which began in 2011. The final installment of the series will take place on April 11, 2026. “Chopin’s music is the language of my soul, and I have dreamed since childhood of someday performing all of his works,” said Ganz, who is widely regarded as one of the leading pianists of his generation. He is expected to be the first to perform every piece of music Chopin ever wrote.
Ganz has appeared as soloist with such orchestras as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the National Philharmonic, the Baltimore and the National Symphonies, the City of London Sinfonia, and L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo. He has performed in many of the world’s major concert halls and has played under the baton of such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Jerzy Semkow and Yoel Levi. A critic for La Libre Belgique wrote of Ganz’s work: “We don’t have the words to speak of this fabulous musician who lives music with a generous urgency and brings his public into a state of intense joy.”