Voices Of The People

Polk State College's "Voices of the People" Performing Arts Series wraps up its inaugural season with its fourth concert, a celebration of the Byronic Hero. The evening of April 11th at 7 p.m. will find the Polk Theatre hosting "The Insatiable Tempest," with music of the irascible genius, Ludwig van Beethoven, and poetry of the mercurial and scandalous Lord Byron. Polk State Professors and Philosophy Club students will join special guests Naira Underwood and Amyr Joyner, violins; Taliaferro Nash,… Show more viola, and Byron Marc Sean, piano, with Derek Menchan, as they perform the Sonata in F for 'Cello and Piano, opus 5, and the String Quartet no. 3 in C, opus 59, one of the "Razumovskys." One of the leading figures of the wild and intense Romantic movement, Lord Byron lent his name to a visage that was to become a staple of the era: the brooding and affected troubled genius. Having amassed a scurrilous number of seduced women and financial debt, rumors of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile, George Gordon, the Sixth Baron Byron, a stupendously talented writer, died of a fever, contracted in a war in which he was a hero, at a mere 36 years of age. That's a tempestuous life; that's the template of the Byronic hero. Several musical virtuosi of the time also fit this bill---Schumann, Chopin, and Paganini, chiefly--- but Beethoven is the king of maladjusted miscreants. While the early opus 'cello sonata shows Beethoven at his youthful best, it is still replete with his well- known gestures: sudden dynamic drops, crescendi that lead nowhere, and displaced accents. But it is in the opus 59 quartet of his "Middle Period," one of the three dedicated to Beethoven's patron, Prince Andrey Razumovsky, that Beethoven is at the peak of his moody and feverish greatness. It is this music that Beethoven remarked his contemporaries would never comprehend, but that only those 200 years thence would... ...well, here we are, centuries later and we do, to some degree, "get" this music, but it is still quite an intellectual stretch. --Derek Menchan, Founder and Director of the Voices of the People Series

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