David Porter to present the 'Concord Sonata' in concert

David H. Porter, president emeritus of Skidmore, returns to the College?s Filene Recital Hall Sunday, March 30, to perform the ?Concord Sonata? by Charles Ives. Admission is free and open to the public.

	David Porter

When Ives?s ?Concord Sonata? received its New York premier in 1939, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune described it as ?exceptionally great music?the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.? The intervening years have reinforced Gilman?s assessment of this work?and yet the ?Concord Sonata? still remains relatively unknown and unappreciated even among sophisticated concert-goers. Though written almost 100 years ago, the ?Concord? still retains its power to challenge and to astonish the listener, still remains a vast and daunting adventure.

Porter learned the ?Concord Sonata? when he was teaching at Carleton College in the mid-1960s, at a time when only a handful of other pianists were playing the piece, and
for the next 15 years he performed it throughout the country. While president of Carleton
(1986-87) and Skidmore (1987-1998) Porter limited his concert schedule but since 1999, when he returned to teaching as a professor at Williams College, he has again been performing on a regular basis. After a hiatus of almost 25 years, he has now returned to the ?Concord Sonata,? with renewed delight in its pianistic challenges, renewed assurance of its place among 20th-century musical masterpieces, and renewed determination to help audiences understand, appreciate, and enjoy it.

With this performance of the ?Concord Sonata? he in effect returns to his Skidmore beginnings, for his first visit to Skidmore, in 1975, was to perform this same work. As always, he will introduce the piece with brief comments from the stage.

Porter is currently the Harry C. Payne Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts at Williams College. Among his recent musical activities at Skidmore are performances of Beethoven?s ?Diabelli Variations? in 2002 and of Schubert's song cycle, ?Die Sch ne M llerin,? in 2004, with tenor Rand Reeves; and a recital in 2006 that featured works by Mozart, Ives, and Schubert.

Before coming to Skidmore, Porter taught classics and music at Carleton College for 25 years. He has given recitals and lecture-recitals throughout the United States, in Great Britain, and on radio and TV, including programs in recent years at Williams College, Bennington College, Drew University, Whitman College, and at the Intermezzo Chamber Music Festival in Salt Lake City. Porter is the author of books on Horace and on Greek tragedy and of two monographs on Virginia Woolf, and editor, with Gunther Schuller and Clara Steuermann, of a book on pianist and Schoenberg colleague Edward Steuermann, with whom he studied for seven years. Porter?s latest book, On the Divide: The Many Lives of Willa Cather, will be published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press. Next year Porter will return to teaching at Skidmore when he serves as the inaugural Tisch Family Distinguished Professor, based in the Department of Classics.