Pianist Cecilia Ignatieff

Description

Cecilia Ignatieff will present rarely heard piano music by Thomas de Hartmann at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in Middlesex, NY Saturday September 7 at 3 pm.  Ignatieff will be assisted by Guild musicians Matthew Shubin, bassoon and Paul Schliffer, flute.  In addition, Thomas A. G. Daly will provide commentary and present an exhibit of documents and images from the de Hartmann Archive in Montreal.  The program will trace de Hartmann's search for his own true musical expression through piano works written from 1906 through 1954.  This free concert will take place in the Guild's beautiful meeting hall at 1445 Upper Hill Rd. in Middlesex.


Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956) was a celebrated young composer and pianist in Tsarist Russia.  At the age of 21 his 4-act ballet "The Scarlet Flower" was performed at the Imperial Opera Houses in St. Petersburg and Moscow with Nijinsky, Pavlova and Fokine dancing the principal roles.  The turmoil of the Russian Revolution forced him to travel to Tiflis and Constantinople before settling in France.  De Hartmann's output as a composer included four symphonies, several operas and ballets, concertos, sonatas, and songs with texts by Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, James Joyce, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as fifty-three film scores.  His music was enthusiastically supported by performers and conductors such as Leopold Stokowski, Bigot, Casals, Paul Tortelier, and Jean Pierre Rampal.

Cecilia Ignatieff has been active as a performer since her university years when she appeared with the Royal Conservatory Orchestra and with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  As a collaborative pianist, she accompanied many instrumentalists and vocalists in Toronto, Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada.  She has several recordings to her credit, including premieres of song cycles by Srul Irving Glick and a ragtime disc.

Thomas A. G. Daly along with this father Thomas C. Daly edited the expanded version of Thomas and Olga de Hartmann's autobiography Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff published in 2011.  The Daly family was closely connected with the de Hartmanns from the beginning of their life in North America and have preserved their legacy, chiefly in connection with the Gurdjieff Foundation of Canada in Montreal.



For more information on the Rochester Folk Art Guild see http://folkartguild.org