Evening Music Presents Piano-Duo
BAR HARBOR—Evening Music, the series of chamber-music concerts presented by the Friends of Music at St. Saviour’s, continues its 2025-26 season on Saturday, 15 November, at 4 p.m. The concert will consist of two major works for piano-duet (one piano with four hands, that is, two players at one keyboard) by Franz Schubertand Maurice Ravel, performed on the historic 1901 Steinway grand piano at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church by Anne Sears and Daniel Pyle.
The piano-duet was a highly-favored medium in the late 1700s and all through the next century, with original works for the combination by major composers, and also a wide repertoire of arrangements of orchestral scores — symphonies and overtures. Schubert composed several works for large-scale works for piano duet, for himself to play. His Grand Duo in C major dates from 1824 when Schubert spent the summer on the estate of Count Esterhazy (the same family that employed Haydn twenty years earlier). It is four-movement work resembling a symphony; in fact, Schubert was starting work at the same time on his famous “Great C-major” Symphony. So great is the resemblance to Schubert’s late symphonies that it has been several times arranged as an orchestral symphony. For this concert, it will be heard in its original piano-version. As a conclusion, Sears and Pyle will play the suite Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) by Maurice Ravel. Composed in 1910, its five movements are based on well-known children’s fairy-stories, like “Sleeping Beauty,” “Tom Thumb,” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
Ann Sears is Professor of Music at Wheaton College (Massachusetts) where she teaches piano and music history, and for many years chaired the Music Department. She has held Wheaton’s Mary Heuser Endowed Chair for the Arts. She holds degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music, Arizona State University, and from The Catholic University of America.
As a collaborative pianist, she appears on three compact discs of African-American song for Albany Records: Deep River: The Songs and Spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh, with bass Oral Moses; Fi-yer! A Century of African-American Song, with tenor William Brown; and, Swing Time: The Songs of Will Marion Cook, also with tenor William Brown. She has written and premiered two song cycles, entitled Red Kimono Songs: His/Hers.
Daniel Pyle is Organist/Music-Director for the St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church in Bar Harbor ME, and Musical Director of the ensemble Harmonie Universelle, From 2019 to 2024 he was the Artistic Director of the Acadia Choral Society, and in 2018 and 2019 he conducted Handel’s Messiah for the Blue Hill Bach Festival. His solo recording, The Maiden’s Songe: Elizabethan music on the lautenwerk, was released in 1994 on the Gasparo label. He holds degrees from the Univ. of Alabama and the Eastman School of Music, and studied at the Sweelinck Conservatorium of Amsterdam and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Dr. Pyle was one of the five founders of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and its Resident Director 2003-2011. He has taught organ, harpsichord, and music history at the University of Kansas, the Louisiana State University, and Clayton State University; he has also taught masterclasses at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK.
The Evening Music series was inaugurated in 2021, to bring concerts of chamber-music to the year-round residents of MDI and the the Downeast region. The concerts take place one Saturday of each month (except December) at 4:00 pm in the sanctuary of St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church in Bar Harbor, presented by the Friends of Music at St. Saviour’s. The admission for all concerts in the series is free, but donations are requested from the listeners in support of the Friends of Music.