On the evening of Valentine’s Day, tucked away in the main recital hall of the Natalie L. Haslam Music Center, three performers displayed their talents as classical musicians in a romance-themed faculty recital.
This event was the faculty recital of Geoffrey Herd, along with Esther Park and Sean Hawthorne. Herd has been a member of faculty at the University of Tennessee for three years, with a specialty in violin performance. Park and Hawthorne are both faculty at East Tennessee State University, with respective focuses in piano in cello.
The three came together to perform pieces by Mozart, Clara Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn. The first and last pieces included all three performers, whereas the second piece was performed only by Herd and Park.
Overall, the group tried to find a theme within the music to fit the tone of Valentine’s Day. The pieces they performed were carefully selected in order to exude the spirit of love for the special day.
“Clearly the Schumann romances fit very well into the Valentine’s Day theme, and the Mendelssohn piece, particularly the second movement, has a very similar quintessential romanticism vibe going on,” Herd explained.
At the music center, recitals like these give faculty the chance to express their talents to their students in a display of what they do best.
“We all love to perform, and we all preach how to perform better to our students. It would be silly for us not to perform, because one hundred hours of us talking to them is not better than us being on stage and showing them what we do because it just means a lot more to them,” Park explained.
Herd also chimed in to express how he felt about performance.
“As performance music faculty, one of our main responsibilities is performance, because everything we teach is based around that,” Herd explained.
Almost every night around six to eight, recitals are put on by incredibly talented performers, including students, faculty, and others. This was the ninety-fifth recital that UT has put on in the 2018-2019 academic year.
“We have amazing guest artists, amazing performances by our students who work incredibly hard to prepare for them, and our faculty is just truly wonderful and a lot of them have huge performing careers. There’s just a lot of great music happening in this building,” Herd said.
Park pointed out that UT’s concerts are free to students, and said that similar free shows are hard to find outside of campus.
“If these concerts were in New York, people would pay around $50 for concerts like these, and there are amazing things happening like this all day long,” Park said.
