Mozart and Schumann Celebrated at Assembly Hall

Professor Paul Meers conducting the orchestra

The Zaki Nassif Music Program and the Department of Fine Arts and Art History organized two concerts commemorating 150 years of the musical legacy of romantic composer Robert Schumann and 250 years of that of classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The first concert, held on May 8 at Assembly Hall, featured the AUB Choir and the Choral Society (a group of non-student adult singers). Accompanying them in the second part of the concert were nineteen members of the Lebanese National Orchestra.

The vocal ensembles, under the baton of conductor Paul Meers, were accompanied on the organ by Olga Bolun. The four soloists, soprano Gertraud Steinkogler Wurzinger, contralto Sonja Maria Napetschnig, tenor Ziad Nehme, and baritone Samer Badr, performed the five Schumann pieces that constituted the first part of the program: Der Traurige Jager; Opera 75; the two-line Die Rose Stand Im Tau, Opera 65; Widmung, Opera 25; and Zigeunerleben, Opera 29. The second half of the program was made up of two Mozart pieces: God Is Our Refuge and the seven-part Vesperae Solennes De Confessore, both of a religious nature.

Two days later, on May 10, a second concert in Assembly Hall also paid tribute to Schumann and Mozart. The concert's theme was Ein Liederabend (An Evening of Song), and again the voices of the four soloists filled the hall, this time also accompanied by the additional soprano talent of Lynn Zovighian, an AUB political studies junior. The program included three Schumann pieces and excerpts from four Mozart operas.

Both concerts, which played to ecstatic, full house audiences, had received widespread support from various sources, among them the Embassy of Austria in Lebanon and the AUB President's Club. Lale Behzade, Bettina and Hermann Genz, and Julie Weltzien provided translations of the lyrics from German into English.