The Ensemble for the Romantic Century is the musicological affiliate in residence at the Brook Center, establishing an annual series of interdisciplinary seminars for each of the Ensemble’s concerts. Three seminars will be given in conjunction with ERC’s 2010 season:
14 January 2010, 5:30 pm: Dionysian Ecstasies: Madness and Music in Nietzsche’s Philosophy
9 March 2010, 5:30 pm: Sad Narcissus: Musical Aestheticism and the Trials of Oscar Wilde
25 May 2010, 5:30 pm: The Forge of Vulcan: Beethoven’s Protean Imagination
Now in its ninth season, ERC was founded by pianist Eve Wolf in 2001, with the intention of creating an engaging and innovative approach to chamber music concerts. Co-directed by Eve Wolf and her fellow-pianist Max Barros, ERC’s stellar team includes James Melo, musicologist; Donald T. Sanders, director of theatrical production; Vanessa James, production designer; and Beverly Emmons, lighting designer, as well as some of the finest actors and musicians active in New York and elsewhere. ERC’s theatrical concerts interweave letters, memoirs, diaries, poems, and other literature with chamber and vocal music; the music’s historical context is reinforced through its connections with history, politics, philosophy, psychology, and the other arts to create a compelling new performance experience.
During its first eight seasons ERC has produced over 30 different theatrical concerts, and it continues to add new productions each season. ERC has partnered with such institutions as The Jewish Museum of New York; the Archivio Fano of Venice, Italy; the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal; the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA; the French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, New York; the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University; the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; and the City University of New York (CUNY). Since 2007 ERC has been a musicological affiliate in residence at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, where ERC has established an annual series of interdisciplinary seminars for each of the Ensemble’s concerts.
ERC’s programs are distinguished by their artistic excellence, breadth of repertoire, and variety of subject matter. During its 2009-10 season, Artists in Exile, ERC extended its interdisciplinary scope with the presentation at Columbia University’s Italian Academy of a Toscanini mini-festival that included a performance of Toscanini: In my Heart too Much of the Absolute, a CUNY seminar with distinguished author and Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs, and a preview showing of the documentary film Toscanini in His Own Words. This production was then performed to a sold-out audience in the Sale Apollinee at Venice’s historic Teatro La Fenice, with an Italian script and Italian actors. ERC’s production Chopin: Letters from Majorca was presented using an original 19th-century Pleyel piano, the type of instrument favored by Chopin, for the performance of the composer’s complete 24 Preludes, op. 28. In Heine: First they Burn Books, ERC explored the connections between politics and music.
In its 2007-08 season, Imaginings, ERC embarked on a revealing journey through the imaginations of four writers, with The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Tolstoy’s Last Days (Tolstoy), Herself to Her a Music (Emily Dickinson), and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (Verne), a large multimedia production that incorporated video design for the first time in an ERC program.
In its sixth season, The Paris Project, ERC created a series of four theatrical concerts that evoked the artistic, literary, and political changes that electrified Paris at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In The Dreyfus Affair, ERC created a large political and musical canvas with seven actors and seven musicians, contrasting with the bohemian and ebullient world evoked in Satie: Bohemian from Montmartre. The season ended with a gala performance, at Florence Gould Hall, of Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, a complex multimedia concert with music from the 1920’s to the 1980’s.
In 2005, ERC completed a commission by the Jewish Museum in New York for a production based on the famous Sonntagsmusik salons of Fanny Mendelssohn. The concert, Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of Her Brother’s Shadow, was related to the Jewish Museum’s exhibition The Power of Conversation, showcasing female salonnières from the 18th to the 20th centuries. ERC also served as music consultant for the exhibition. Van Gogh’s Ear, an ERC collaboration with The French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA, and the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal, was performed at Florence Gould Hall and then – in both French and English – in Montreal, where it received international acclaim. Strad Magazine hailed the production as “the most intriguing and successful program of the entire festival.”
In 2004, the Ensemble presented The Young Arthur Rubinstein at the Arthur Rubinstein Hall in São Paulo during the Eleazar de Carvalho Week, to overwhelming success. In the spring of 2004, Schubert’s Dream was performed while ERC was in residence at Williams College in Massachusetts.
ERC’s artistic excellence was recognized in 2007-08 through a professional performance grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and more recently through a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA).
ERC is proud to announce that it has been awarded grants from both NYSCA and DCA for the upcoming 2009-10 season. These grants are a testimony to the growing recognition of the Ensemble as one of the most innovative chamber music groups in New York.
In its relatively short history, the Ensemble for the Romantic Century has enriched the New York musical scene with highly innovative productions that are also historically informed, aesthetically exquisite, and emotionally transporting.
