PIANO RECITAL: Marie-Catherine Girod

Piano recital in the old church of the Priory of Saint-Nicolas de Campagnac on a Steinway model D from Auday Musiques: duration approximately 1h10

Marie-Christine Girod will perform a romantic program by Frédéric Chopin, Félix Mendelssohn, and Fanny Mendelssohn.

Marie-Catherine Girod is a French pianist , born in Peyrehorade on August 19 , 1949 , in the Landes department.

Marie-Catherine Girod studied piano at the Bordeaux Conservatory of Music, then at the National Superior Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris where she entered the class of Jules Gentil . She subsequently worked with Paul Badura-Skoda and György Sebők . She is regularly invited to the Mai de Bordeaux , La Roque d'Anthéron festivals, the Festival Estival de Paris , the Chopin de Bagatelle festival, the Nohant festival , the Husum festival in Germany , the Alexander Paley and his friends at the Moulin festival. of Andé ( Normandy ). She performs in recital in Europe and the United States ( Richmond Festival in Virginia ), in chamber groups and as a soloist with various orchestras, including the Orchester de Bretagne with which she recorded Paul 's Fantasy for piano and orchestra Le Flem . She frequently participates in concerts organized by Radio France and in radio broadcasts.

She is as comfortable in the great classical and romantic repertoire ( Carl Maria von Weber , Frédéric Chopin , Felix Mendelssohn ,) as with Maurice Ravel , Claude Debussy or Henri Dutilleux . It is also found in a much rarer repertoire, contributing largely to the rediscovery of little-played composers. Among others, his recordings of works by Gabriel Dupont , Maurice Emmanuel , André Jolivet , Arthur Lourié and Gustave Samazeuilh are unanimously praised by critics, and have earned him numerous awards. Through her personal choices and her commitment to bringing music to life, Marie-Catherine Girod highlights, through records and concerts, unjustly neglected composers.

In addition to his technical mastery, his playing demonstrates great expressiveness, by turns brilliant and intimate, clear, colorful and delicate, using a vast palette of nuances which always seduces the audience. In 2009 she completed a recording cycle of the complete piano works of Felix Mendelssohn .

A teacher, she directed the Music Conservatory of Sucy-en-Brie (94) from 1986 to 2012 , she created the Sucy National Piano Competition in 1992 which she organized until 2005 , and she has been teaching since October 2011 at the École Normale de Musique de Paris .

 

Frédéric Chopin is a composer and virtuoso pianist of Franco - Polish ancestry, born March ¹ , 1810 in Żelazowa Wola ( Duchy of Warsaw ) and died October 17 , 1849 in Paris ² .

After his training at the Warsaw High School of Music and an early career in Poland and Vienna , he left Poland and, at the age of 21 , he moved to France (he came from his father of a Lorraine family originally from Marainville-sur-Madon ), where he developed his inspiration in the excitement of the Parisian pianistic world and in the memory of his damaged homeland. There he met George Sand , who would be his companion for nine years.

Recognized as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic period , Frédéric Chopin is also one of the most famous pianists of the 19th ^century . His music is still one of the most played today and remains an essential part of understanding the universal pianistic repertoire. Along with Franz Liszt , he is the father of modern technique on his instrument and influences a whole line of modern composers, including Claude Debussy , Alexandre Scriabin , and Sergei Rachmaninov .

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, more commonly called Felix Mendelssohn (sometimes Felix with accent), born February 3 , 1809 in Hamburg and died November 4 , 1847 in Leipzig , was a German composer , conductor and pianist of the early period romantic . A member of the Mendelssohn family , he is the grandson of the philosopher and rabbi Moses Mendelssohn , the son of the banker and philanthropist Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy , and the brother of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn .

After early success in Germany , he traveled throughout Europe and was particularly well received in Britain , where, during his ten visits, several of his major works were premiered. A contemporary of Chopin , Liszt , Wagner and Berlioz , he left a very fruitful body of work for his short life of 38 years ( symphonies , concerti , oratorios , overtures , incidental music , works for solo piano , works for solo organ and chamber music ) . His notoriety rests on some of his greatest masterpieces: the overture and incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" , the overture "The Hebrides" , the "Italian" symphonies » and “Scottish” , the oratorios “Paulus” and “Elias” , the second Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64 , the String Octet and Trio ^No. 1 in D minor, op. 49 .

He participated in the rediscovery of baroque music and especially of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georges-Frédéric Handel . He is notably one of the first composers of his time to renew the art of counterpoint , which sometimes earns him to be considered "the classic of the romantics". After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes, anti- Semitism in ^the 19th and 20th ^centuries and the Nazi ban on playing his music, he was rediscovered in the second half of the 20th ^century and recognized as a major composer of the Romantic era.

At the end of the first performance of L' Écossaise , he was considered by Wagner , an anti-Semitic composer who was nevertheless usually prone to virulent criticism against him, as a “landscaper of the first order” ¹ .

Fanny Mendelssohn, also known as Fanny Hensel, was a German composer and pianist , born in Hamburg on November 14 , 1805 and died in Berlin on May 14 , 1847 . A member of the Mendelssohn family , she is the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn .

She is one of the renowned composers of the 19th ^century . She knew many poets, such as Heinrich Heine , Joseph von Eichendorff and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe whose works she set to music.