The piano and great French composers go hand in hand, and that will be evident at next week's James Herrin Piano Festival guest recital.
Dr. Richard Shuster, pianist and professor of music at Texas Woman's University, will perform a program of music steeped in the French Romantic tradition. His guest artist recital is held at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Stilwell Humanities Music Hall at Texarkana College.
This co-presentation from TC's music department and The Allegro Club, formerly the Texarkana Music Teachers Association, is free.
"The major piece of the program is by Ravel, Maurice Ravel. It's called 'Miroirs,'" said Mary Scott Goode, professor of music at TC. The word "miroirs" is French for "mirrors," and this piece is a five-movement suite.
"All programmatic, so they have different titles, different pictures, different scenes that are being portrayed," Goode said. It was first written as a solo piano suite but later orchestrated by Ravel and others.
"The pieces are marvelous," Goode said, noting the late Romantic composers loved program music and the ability to enhance the sounds with images. "It's also a Romantic trait that Romantics love the other arts," she said.
In a way, it gives the audience something to listen for, she explains. They can use certain tone colors and sound effects, such as a sound that mimics a bird. Examples of famous program music include Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain." They are works that create a picture in your mind, Goode said.
Also on tap is a piece by Gabriel Fauré, "Barcarolles," which refers to folk songs sung by Venetian gondoliers, Goode said, describing a barcarolle as "sort of a boat song."
"The image is sort of a feeling of the movement of the boar, rocking back and forth. It's something pleasant," Goode said.
Furthermore, this repertoire for the recital includes Claude Debussy, one of the "Preludes." Goode says this was quite the era for French music and a golden age of writing for the piano. Debussy's "Preludes" were composed between 1909 and 1913. This is when the piano really arrived as an instrument, said the music professor.
Shuster, who's performed in Texarkana before, has a strong background in performing Fauré's music. He also recorded the composer's work for a CD, "Gabriel Fauré: The Complete Nocturnes." He received degrees from the Eastman School of Music and from Indiana University, and in 2019 he will teach piano literature courses at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Hungary through a Fulbright Scholar Grant.
Goode notes this is the twenty-third year of the piano festival. It has become a tradition that both piano students and teachers look forward to seeing, as does the public, who are invited to attend.
"And this is my fourteenth year of being the chairman of it," she said. "I'm proud of what this festival's grown into and what we're doing."