HONORING MENDELSSOHN'S BICENTENNIAL

Students perform alongside faculty for special concerts

Like musicians and communities around the globe, Rice University's Shepherd School of Music is celebrating the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn, a German composer, pianist and conductor whose works continue to play an important role in performances and music education. The Shepherd School will celebrate and honor Mendelssohn with free concerts at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Feb. 3 in Alice Pratt Brown Hall's Duncan Recital Hall.

The concerts, comprising pieces from all periods of his life, will be performed by faculty and students.

"Almost all students from music schools and conservatories play Mendelssohn," said Kenneth Goldsmith, professor of violin. "But not all students have the opportunity to perform his work with faculty members. Not a lot of students are good enough. But at the Shepherd School, the level of talent is so high, we have no problem selecting students to fill these roles."

Goldsmith said the selected students have risen to the challenge issued by the faculty performers and the music itself. Those students were selected by the performing faculty: Goldsmith; Cho-Liang Lin, professor of violin; Ivo-Jan van der Werff, professor of viola; and James Dunham, professor of viola and chamber music.

"The faculty here at the Shepherd School is one of the greatest," Goldsmith said. "When you sit with these professionals, you sense where a piece is going and see uniform and graceful movements. The students performing with them will learn a lot about cues and response."

The students asked to perform are thrilled by the opportunity to take the stage with their teachers.

"To play on a concert involved with the faculty at Shepherd is a dream performance," said Christina Wilke, a graduate student playing in the concert. "As students, we frequent their recitals and look to them for inspiration and guidance in our own chamber performances. To play alongside them makes us work our very hardest to make our individual playing rise to the occasion and try and play as a colleague -- not just as a student."

Wilke has been coached by Goldsmith, a violinist with the Mirecourt Trio who has played all of the chamber music of Mendelssohn in concert and recording. She said he provided her with a wealth of knowledge about the art of chamber music and the musical language of Mendelssohn.

For David Huntsman, another student-performer, the honor of being chosen to play in the Mendelssohn concerts has caused him to reflect on the unique relationship the Shepherd School students and faculty share.

"It was an honor to have the faculty request me to act as a colleague instead of a pupil --an honor that exhibits their generous nature and close relationship we as students have with our professors," Huntsman said. "The preparation for the upcoming events has afforded me a rare style of education, which turns out to be quite apropos to these particular pieces."

Huntsman said he learned how that style of education is an extension of Mendelssohn's own experience. After Mendelssohn completed work on his Octet for Strings, he brought a student with him to perform one of the parts. That student was the now-famous Joseph Joachim.

"Mendelssohn is an often-underrated composer," Wilke said. "Many critics say his works are too conventional and did nothing to further music after Beethoven's death. However, his sheer amount of work is a gift to music."

His work includes symphonies, concerti, oratorios and piano and chamber music. He began composing at a young age and had written 12 symphonies by the time he was 10. He composed the "Wedding March," first played in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and now frequently played in wedding recessionals.

"I've played him all my life," Goldsmith said. "He made these huge contributions to music while being a great promoter of important composers for the history of music."

While conducting the orchestra in Leipzig, Germany, Mendelssohn unearthed and performed Johann Sebastian Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" for the first time since Bach's death.

"Mendelssohn's complete works are an astonishing collection of brilliance the world is better off for having," Huntsman said. "Ironically, however, I believe his greatest contribution to music is not his own composition but the rediscovery and promotion of the works Bach."