Join us for a special performance by the Musicians of Ma’alwyck on the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day as they present a musical program of great poignancy. The afternoon will begin with a screening of the 1918 silent film Under Four Flags, accompanied by a new score composed by Max Caplan, commissioned and performed by the Musicians of Ma’alwyck.
Following the short film, the Musicians will play a series of works performed or composed by David Hochstein (1892-1918) and Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962). Hochstein, a virtuoso concert violinist from Rochester, NY, was killed on the front line in France in October 1918. Dramatic readings from Hochstein correspondence, period sources, and Hochstein contemporaries including Willa Cather will intersperse these pieces.
The searingly beautiful piano quintet To a Soldier by Samuel Gardner will close the program. Gardner was an American concert violinist in the first decades of the 1900s and a respected composer. He won the first Pulitzer Prize in music in 1918 and moved in the same musical circles as Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler. Gardner was deeply affected by his friend David Hochstein’s death; the piano quintet To a Soldier was his response to the despair. The piece, in four movements, depicts the life of Hochstein from his student days to his death on the front.
Musicians of Ma'alwyck core players Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz (director and violinist) and Petia Kassarova (cellist) are joined by guest artists Theodore Arm (violinist, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), Andrew Snow (violist), and Max Caplan (composer and pianist). Bill Levering, pastor of First Reformed Church in Schenectady and renowned speaker, and Norman Thibodeau, Musicians of Ma’alwyck flutist, will perform the dramatic readings.
This program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Admission to this program is free, and donations are welcome. For more information, call (518) 673-2314 or email Curator of Education & Public Engagement Jenna Peterson Riley.
Image: "Under Four Flags: Third United States Official War Picture" (movie poster)
