July 12, 2001|By Phil Greenfield | Phil Greenfield,SPECIAL TO THE SUN
Mozart's music has the power to turn even the deepest and most gifted among us into wide-eyed children.
"I am in love with Mozart like a young girl," wrote the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
"Mozart," said the great 19th-century composer Antonin Dvorak, "is sunshine."
We'll all have the chance to sit in awe of Salzburg's eternal wunderkind Friday when faculty members of the Heifetz International Institute, Annapolis' own summer music festival, present an all-Mozart concert in St. John's College's Great Hall. A sparkling piano sonata, the exquisitely dramatic G minor Piano Quartet and the C major Piano Trio will be on the program, which begins at 7:30 p.m.
"Mozart is the one composer we can devote an entire evening to and manage to satisfy everybody," says violist Sel Kardan, executive director of the Institute. "You don't find too many Mozart detractors out there."
Making Friday's concert even more special is the appearance of several of the Institute's most distinguished visitors.
Mozart's buoyant, crystalline C major Piano Sonata, K. 330, will be played by Craig Sheppard, the silver medalist at England's Leeds International Piano Concerto in 1972, who is now professor of piano at the University of Washington.
The violinist in the K. 548 Piano Trio will be Shirley Givens, who coaches young artists at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and the Juilliard School in New York City.
She will be joined by Peabody's Marian Hahn, a first-rate chamber pianist who plies her trade with the Amadeus Trio, and Harry Wimmer, the noted cellist, teacher and author of The Joy of Cello Playing.
Violist John Graham, who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and has appeared with such vaunted ensembles as the Juilliard, Tokyo and Guarneri string quartets, will join three younger colleagues for the G minor Piano Quartet.
G minor was a key Mozart reserved for some of his most dramatic statements (think of the Symphony No. 40, for example), and the opening movement of this deeply personal work for violin, viola, cello and piano is certainly one of them.
Ever one for maintaining classical balance, though, Mozart finishes off the piece with one his most winsome rondos.
Heifetz Institute instructors Grigory Kalinovsky and Tao Chang Yu will round out the program with an arrangement of the B-flat Sonata for Violin and Piano, K. 378, transcribed for two violins.
Tickets for Friday's all-Mozart concert are $20; $12 for students. Reservations: 410-280-0555.
