Event Detail

UM cello professor Dr. Adam Collins presents a free chamber music recital with colleagues from the University of Montana School of Music. The program of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, César Franck, and Kinan Azmeh evoke memory in three distinct musical voices. Across its seven movements, Bach’s Cello Suite No. 6 vividly summons personal memories of every listener. While the Suite is not a specifically programmatic or pictorial work, the strength of each movement’s mood invites the listener to recall episodes of revelry, tenderness, solemnity, and joy from their own life. Azmeh’s The Fence, the Rooftop and Distant Sea (for cello and clarinet) is intentionally crafted to reflect upon personal memory of distant time and place. Azmeh wrote this four-movement piece to address the senses of memory, longing, loss, and hope that intertwine when considering his homeland of Syria from the distance of war-forced exile. Franck’s glorious Sonata for Violin, and its composer-approved transcription for cello and piano on this concert, has a memory of its own that guides the experience of hearing and performing its four movements. Themes and motives that appear early in the work reappear in later movements, in a variety of subtle and overt ways. This reemergence of familiar or transformed melodies analogizes the experience of memories, which themselves vary from intangible sensations of recollection to vivid reliving of the past. Dr. Collins will perform alongside Margery Whatley, UM's piano professor, and Christopher Kirkpatrick, UM’s professor of clarinet.