Concert Review, Fabian Concert Series 1/13/26 - The lost are found: Mercer concert brings neglected late Romantic works back into focus

William Ford for Earrelevant | 14 JAN 2026

When I was in junior high school, I had an English teacher named Mr. Myers. He was short, stocky, and animated by a seemingly endless supply of energy. This was the kind of teacher who would climb onto his desk and act out Hamlet while we were reading it, fully committed and entirely unselfconscious.

One afternoon, for reasons I no longer remember, Mr. Myers arrived not only with his enthusiasm but with his cello and his hi-fi system. He told us he wanted us to hear music by Ernő Dohnányi, his favorite composer, and then proceeded to play along with a recording, cello in hand, introducing a roomful of junior-high students to a composer none of us had ever encountered.

What stayed with me was not the novelty of the moment, but the sound itself. The music felt densely packed and unrelenting. Lines overlapped, harmonies thickened, and there was little sense of empty space. Everything seemed present at once. It was not music that invited casual listening or easy comprehension. It asserted itself through accumulation rather than melody alone.

At the time, it was simply unusual. In retrospect, it feels extraordinary.

It is difficult now not to marvel at the dedication and imagination required for a teacher to do that at all, let alone in a junior-high English class. Mr. Myers was not offering enrichment for its own sake. He was sharing something he loved, trusting that it might matter even if the moment passed without immediate effect.

In the decades since, I have heard Dohnányi performed in a concert hall perhaps once. His music, like that of Sergei Taneyev and Moritz Moszkowski, has remained largely outside the standard repertory, admired quietly by musicians but rarely embraced by institutions. That long absence made the recent concert at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, feel quietly corrective. Works by Taneyev, Moszkowski, and Dohnányi were performed by the faculty and students of the Mercer Townsend School of Music with seriousness, conviction, and mastery.

What ultimately linked these composers was not obscurity itself, but their differing approaches to musical density, and how fully each sustained it.

The program brought together three composers once embedded in the mainstream of European musical life and now heard far less frequently. Their music reflects a moment when Romantic language had reached full saturation, just before aesthetic priorities shifted toward fragmentation and restraint. What united the program was belief in musical weight, formal rigor, and density as an expressive value.

Sergei Taneyev’s Trio for Two Violins and Viola opened the evening. A student and close associate of Tchaikovsky, and a figure respected by Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, Taneyev stood at the intellectual center of Moscow’s musical life. His music synthesizes Russian lyricism with Germanic discipline, emphasizing counterpoint and structural clarity.

The four movements unfold with classical logic: a tightly argued opening, a scherzo-like movement emphasizing rhythmic play, a slow movement built on sustained argument rather than melodic release, and a finale that consolidates material through disciplined development. All three voices or lines remain continuously active.

As an expressive experience, however, the trio’s scoring poses a specific problem. With no cello or bass to provide downward pull, the music is concentrated almost entirely in the middle and upper registers. The ear tracks constant motion without the grounding effect that lower voices normally supply. The density is linear rather than cumulative, producing activity without corresponding weight.

In a larger hall, where sound disperses quickly, the music can feel diffuse despite its busyness. The trio might register more persuasively in a much smaller setting, a living room or salon, where proximity could sharpen focus and lend intimacy to its intricate design. Here, the work commanded attention but rarely produced a sense of arrival, engaging the analytical ear more readily than the emotional imagination.

Moritz Moszkowski’s Suite for Two Violins and Piano, Op. 71 offered a contrasting approach. From the opening movement, the performance revealed a composer with a keen ear for balance and surface elegance. The two violins converse fluidly while the piano sparkles without dominating, producing textures that are clear, buoyant, and immediately appealing.

Moszkowski’s chamber writing sits firmly within the late-Romantic German tradition, drawing heavily on Brahmsian models. The suite unfolds through characterful movements emphasizing lyrical melody, polished ensemble writing, and idiomatic handling of all three instruments.

Yet Moszkowski’s relationship to density is deliberately restrained. Where Taneyev accumulates detail without weight, Moszkowski avoids accumulation almost entirely. His textures remain controlled, climaxes carefully managed, and harmonic pressure kept at bay. Its pleasures are genuine but largely self-contained, satisfying in the moment without generating the sense of pressure or inevitability that draws a listener back. That conservatism helps explain Moszkowski’s marginal position today.

Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet No. 1 closed the program and immediately announced itself as a work of scale and ambition. Rooted unmistakably in Brahmsian textures, the writing intensifies that inheritance through massed sonorities, thick harmonic layering, and frequent unison passages reinforced by the cello an octave below.

This approach produces a saturated, muscular sound. Where Brahms compresses energy, Dohnányi amplifies it. Where Brahms suggests weight, Dohnányi asserts it directly. Melodic lines are generous, climaxes forceful, and the emotional temperature consistently high.

Despite its derivative language, the piece succeeds because it commits fully to its aesthetic. Density becomes expressive rather than oppressive, drawing the listener into a sound world that feels immersive and purposeful. Among the composers on the program, Dohnányi emerged as the most convincing inheritor of late-Romantic intensity by fully embracing its demands.

The performances were musically and technically first-rate, marked by clarity of ensemble and sustained commitment to demanding repertoire. These works may be out of fashion, but they were played as if their value were self-evident. Special commendation is due to the Mercer students—violinists Benjamin Linton and Isaac Willocks, violist Brinson Moore, and cellist Kathryn Fakely—whose playing approached the level of their mentors in assurance and musical intelligence. The faculty performances by violinists Amy Schwartz Moretti, Robert McDuffie, violist Lawrence Dutton, and pianist Albert Tiu were distinguished by exceptional skill, stylistic authority, and musical focus.

Neva Langley Fickling Hall appeared near its 200-seat capacity, a heartening sight for a program devoted to lesser-heard composers. The hall itself, while visually inviting, presented challenges. The temperature was noticeably cold, and the acoustics tended toward dryness, favoring clarity over warmth and blend, particularly in dense textures.

As the concert drew to a close, I found myself thinking again of Mr. Myers and that improbable afternoon decades ago. At the time, his gesture felt eccentric, even slightly bewildering. Only now does its meaning come into focus. What he was sharing was not merely a composer, but a way of listening: music that builds significance through saturation rather than transparency.

Hearing Dohnányi’s music performed with such conviction brought that memory into alignment with experience. Its thickness, harmonic compression, and refusal to thin out or recede felt not dated, but deliberate. What once seemed overwhelming now felt coherent.

In that sense, this concert did more than revive forgotten works. It confirmed that some music waits for the listener to grow into its density, just as acts of generosity in teaching often take years to disclose their full meaning.

What was once lost was not the music itself, but the patience required to hear it fully. ■