The Athenaeum Concert Series presents Renewal from Ashes – War, Destruction, Remembrance, Peace in its inaugural 2023-24 season, inviting five celebrated guest artists to speak about and perform music composed at times of war.
For the second concert in the series, "Destruction," we examine how, for more than a century, nation states have called upon particular works of classical music to serve as propaganda in times of war and political strife. While Allied Forces during World War II most notably turned to the “fate motive” from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as a symbol of victory, another popular symphonic work in C minor – Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto – played a comparable role in the 1944 Allied propaganda film Victory in Tunisia, a year before it was immortalized in the soundtrack of the 1945 British film Brief Encounter. Composed at the turn of the 20th century in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the Concerto is paradigmatic of the Romantic piano concerto tradition, its fateful dramatic arc and potent symbols of love and heroic triumph all readily exploitable by nations with populations reeling from destruction and loss.
Ben Laude is a concert pianist, music educator, and video producer whose playing has been described by the New York Times as “superb in pace, tone, and eloquence.” He has performed in recent seasons with the Southern Tier Symphony, New Amsterdam Symphony, and Austin Civic Orchestras and has been heard in live broadcasts on WQXR (New York), WFMT (Chicago), and WWFM. He has created hundreds of video lessons and interviews with dozens of world class pianists for the online music education platform Tonebase and received a YouTube Silver Creator Award for the Tonebase Piano YouTube channel. Laude has held faculty positions at Bard College-Conservatory and New York’s Suzuki School for Strings and holds degrees in piano performance from Rice University and the Juilliard School.
The Athenaeum Concert Series has been organized by founder and director Sheena Hui '19.
