Bob Jones University hosts the first of the Concert, Opera, and Drama series of the academic year on Thursday, Sept. 18, at 7:30 pm.
Pianist Ilya Yakushev will perform a solo piano repertoire featuring composers from Mozart to Mussorgsky. Dr. Paul Overly, part of the music faculty, said that the program is designed to communicate to a general audience, since it features well-known composers and accessible music.
“You do not have to be a musician to have this music speak to you,” Dr. Overly said.
Prior to the concert, music historian Dr. Overly will present the musical and historical context of Yakushev’s concert repertoire at 6:30 p.m. in Levinson Hall. The pre-concert talk is free and open to the public.
The program begins with a Mozart Partita – a one-movement vignette – a picture. Beethoven bridges the Classical and Romantic music periods. His “Sonata Pathétique” shows up in commercials and other pop-culture stories. Chopin and Rachmaninov follow with a reflective nocturne and set of preludes respectively. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at Exhibition” closes the evening, feeling like an auditory stroll around an art gallery.
An award-winning pianist, Mr. Yakushev established his name in Russia where he studied at Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music in St. Petersburg. After that, he continued his music education at Mannes College of Music and spent his career performing with orchestras around the world.
This artist series is the opportunity to pause in the middle of our hectic lives and to contemplate life. As Dr. Overly said, music is a metaphor of our lives, because we are here for a moment, and then we pass away. Music is momentary.
But why would someone spend part of their scarce 1,440 minutes of the day for something easily available on a phone?
The community support of music is intensely human, because “these are people writing to people,“ Dr. Overly said. “It’s as simple as that.”
“Give yourself to the moment,” he said. “This is an opportunity to grab onto the music and speak to you. Let the composer, let the performer speak to you. We are all at different stages of our lives. We are all going through different things. We have different circumstances, but there will be something there in the music that will come to you powerfully, if you allow yourself to take part in it.”
People long to be known. They long to be understood. Music expresses this longing and explores the heart of man. To know music is to know mankind.
