Charles Ives Birthday Concert at Tufts Oct. 20
The Tufts University Department of Music presents the Charles Ives Birthday Concert, a performance by distinguished Ivesians and Board Members of the Charles Ives Society, in the Distler Performance Hall at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center on Sunday, October 20, 2013 at 3 p.m. as part of the Sunday at Tufts – Community Concert Series.
Tufts University is the business home of the Charles Ives Society, Inc. where pianist and Ives Society Vice-President/Treasurer Donald Berman is a Lecturer. Donald Berman, pianist and Daniel Stepner, violinist, will be joined by soprano Deborah Rentz-Moore for an afternoon showcasing the eclectic American iconoclast.
Donald Berman’s CD’s The Unknown Ives and The Unknown Ives Volume 2 (New World Records) represent the only extant recordings of the complete shorter piano works of Charles Ives.  Berman is also the General Editor of the Critical Editions of three volumes of piano music that will be published in the next year and a half.  His solo offering on this concert will be a premiere performance of the Critical Edition of The Emerson Transcriptions, four short works that explore musical material Ives incorporated into his final edition of The Concord Sonata. Berman was a protégé of the American pianist John Kirkpatrick who premiered The Concord Sonata in 1939.
Joining Berman will be Daniel Stepner, who was the first violinist along with the pianist Kirkpatrick to record the complete Ives Violin Sonatas. Stepner and Berman will perform the original violin/piano edition of Decoration Day from The Holidays Symphony and the monumental Third Sonata for Violin and Piano. They will be joined by Deborah Rentz-Moore for songs that feature piano and violin, including Ives’s final composition, Sunrise. Rentz-Moore and Berman will also offer a set of songs that feature ballads (An Old Flame), religious hymns (At the River), and explorations of Americana (Charlie Rutledge, Ann Street, The Housatonic at Stockbridge).
The Granoff Music Center is located at 20 Talbot Avenue on Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit as.tufts.edu/music/musiccenter or call the Granoff Music Center Box Office at 617.627.3679.
– Information from Tufts University