March 28, 2024
Annapolis, US 49 F

A celebration of poetry and music–August 26

michael GlaserOn Friday, August 26 at 8:00 pm, poets Michael S. Glaser and Deanna Nikaido will join pianist Brian Ganz in “An Evening of Renewal: A Celebration of Poetry and Music.” The three artists will explore with the audience the renewing capacity of poetry and music to help us better understand the darkness of our times and still hold the light that illuminates the beautiful in human experience. The evening is a presentation of the 4th Friday Concert Series held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, 333 Dubois Road in Annapolis. Tickets are $15 at the door. For more information, visit www.tinyurl.com/UUCA-concerts or call 410-266-8044 Monday through Thursday.

Michael S. Glaser is a Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where he served as professor of English for nearly 40 years. He also served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004-2009. Deanna Nikaido is the author of two collections of poetry, Voice Like Water and Vibrating With Silence.  She was a coach and design specialist for Bookinday (BID), a student-run publishing program, and a regional coordinator for Poetry Out Loud in Maryland.

“I am thrilled to welcome these marvelous poets to the 4th Friday concert series,” said pianist Ganz, who is also artistic director of the series. “Michael and I have shared music and poetry with audiences together many times over the years and it is always a deeply enriching experience. He knows how to challenge his listeners not just to receive illumination from poetry, but also to explore the darkness and mine its riches for truth as well. And do we ever need that in this crazy election season!” Ganz added that this will be the first time he has appeared with Deanna Nikaido, who has a great fondness for the poetry of Rumi and is also a practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu, the ancient art of harmonizing life energy, which reflects itself in both her poetry and the musicality of voice with which she presents her poems.

Brian Ganz, PianistGanz, an internationally acclaimed pianist, is familiar to Annapolis audiences as an enthusiastic performer of the works of Frédéric Chopin, whose complete works he is currently performing at the Music Center at Strathmore. For the “Evening of Renewal,” however, he will play music of Chopin’s contemporary Robert Schumann, his Scenes from Childhood. Schumann entitled the last of the movements, serendipitously, “The Poet Speaks.” 

The evening aims to demonstrate what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks might have meant when he wrote: “There are truths we can express in systems, but others we can only tell through story. There is the kind of knowledge for which we need detachment, but another kind of knowledge we can only achieve through attachment- through empathy and identification with an other… There are truths we can tell in prose, but others for which only poetry is adequate.”

The next concert of the 4th Friday Concert Series will take place Friday, September 23 at 8pm, and feature violinist Joshua Hong and harpist Olivia Kim.  For more information, visit www.tinyurl.com/UUCA-concerts or call 410-266-8044 Monday through Thursday.

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