Ganz to Offer Free Piano Talk at SMCM
St. Mary’s College of Maryland musician-in-residence Brian Ganz will continue his PianoTalk series at the college at 11:20am Thursday, November 6, with a free recital featuring Fryderyk Chopin’s three mazurkas.
The program, which will take place at the Dodge Performing Arts Center on the college campus, is titled “Chopin’s Sunset Mazurkas.” Mr. Ganz will offer an in-depth discussion of the mazurkas and then perform them in their entirety.
For more information, call 240-895-4229.
“Chopin 3 Mazurkas, Op. 63 were the last mazurkas Chopin composed and deemed worthy of publication. This is significant because the mazurka was the genre he composed throughout his entire creative life, almost 60 of them in all,” Mr. Ganz said. “In them he expresses his deep love for his homeland of Poland. These are three of the loveliest of them all. They include the very first mazurka I ever heard — and subsequently fell in love with — and also one of the few I have heard live in performance from other pianists. They express joy, longing, melancholy, sadness, nostalgia, playfulness, prayer and everything in between. Above all, they express Chopin’s endless creativity and capacity for beauty.”
Mr. Ganz is on a quest to perform all of Fryderyk Chopin’s 240 works.
“Chopin’s music is the language of my soul, and I have dreamed since childhood of someday performing all of his works,” he said. He is expected to be the first to perform every piece of music Chopin ever wrote.
The final recital will be at Strathmore on April 11, 2026.
The PianoTalk series at the college will continue this semester on November 18, and will feature Chopin’s Barcarolle, one of his greatest masterpieces.
Mr. Ganz has appeared as soloist with such orchestras as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the National Philharmonic, the Baltimore and the National Symphonies, the City of London Sinfonia, and L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo.
He has performed in many of the world’s major concert halls and has played under the baton of such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Jerzy Semkow, and Yoel Levi.
A critic for La Libre Belgique wrote of Mr. Ganz’s work: “We don’t have the words to speak of this fabulous musician who lives music with a generous urgency and brings his public into a state of intense joy.”
