Marina Frolova-Walker, a Russian-born British musicologist and music historian, was Visiting Gresham Professor of Russian Music in 2018-2019 and Gresham Professor of Music 2019-2023. She is Professor of Music History and Director of Studies in Music at Clare College, Cambridge. She is a specialist in the Russian music of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published extensively on Russian music and is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster for BBC Radio 3.
This Gresham lecture explores the emergence of the "femme au piano" (Women at the Piano) genre in XIXth-century French painting, depicted by artists like Renoir, Van Gogh, and Matisse. What suddenly made this topic so popular, and what does it tell us about the role of women in music-making at the time? Tracing the genre's roots from the Italian Renaissance clavichord depictions to Vermeer’s Dutch domestic scenes, and XVIIIth-century harpsichord portraits. Discover how the piano became a middle-class status symbol and how modernists of the 1910s-1920s reinterpreted it. Presented from the perspective of a music historian, this lecture will delve into the roots of the french” genre and reveal how these paintings offer a window onto women’s music-making.
After this some piano is good. Listening piano or playing piano - your choice depending of your sckills.
