Richard D. Russell

On October 22, Dan Wang premiered my new piano solo, “Dantes Variations” at a two-day conference sponsored by the journal 19th-Century Music and hosted at Fordham University in New York City. It happened to be the 200th birthday of Franz Liszt, and many Liszt pieces were included in the concert.

The interdisciplinary conference was organized by the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, editor of the sponsoring journal, who asked me to compose a piece for the concluding concert. The topics of the two-day seminar “… range as widely as the contributors’ imagination can compass…” including…

“…portrayals of music or musicians in nineteenth-century literary works, musical representations in nineteenth-century music of literary genres, characters, or texts, literary opera, incidental music, aesthetic theories, models of performance, treatments of nineteenth-century music in twentieth– and twenty-first-century literature and film, treatments of nineteenth-century literature in twentieth-and twenty-first-century music, including opera and film music, and the list goes on.

My piece was a theme and variations based on Edmond Dantes from Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Here are pictures of Mr. Kramer, Mr. Wang, and me. (Click image for larger size.)

Lawrence Kramer opens the concert

Dan Wang performs “Dantes Variations.”

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