-- Original Article 3/18/24 --
Over the years, the Dickens Project has hosted a number of performances in its Thursday evening lecture slot. Participants have been treated to Dickens’s great-great-grandson Gerald’s one-man interpretations of Dickens’s novels, a version of Miriam Margolyes’ “Dickens’s Women,” and a Magic Lantern show, among other presentations. These enjoyments have been interspersed with the Project’s long-running Farce, originally envisioned by Georgetown’s John Glavin and more recently written and produced by Adam Abraham of Iowa’s Cornell College.
This year, however, the Project moves in a different direction in its Thursday evening entertainment by hosting pianist Lura Johnson. The Resident Pianist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Principal Pianist of the Delaware Symphony, Johnson is both a soloist and an orchestral pianist, in addition to having a special fondness for chamber music—Brahms is a specialty. She will be accompanied by Jason Rudy.
Johnson also writes her own program notes, teaches, and excels at speaking to her audience. This is the added value she brings to the Dickens Project—she and Rudy, of the University of Maryland, who is affiliated with the Project and also a musician, will discuss the music of the Victorian era and will perform pieces that would have been familiar to that audience. While the duo has not yet finalized their program, Johnson promises that the pieces they perform and discuss will “explore connections and similarities between music and literature.”
-- Update 7/17/2024 --
As elaborated above, Lura Johnson, the Steinway Artist and Resident Pianist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Jason Rudy, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, will be the Thursday evening entertainment at the Dickens Universe.
Rudy was traveling when we wrote our previous introduction to this event, and he now is able to tell us that he and Johnson will offer “a collaborative evening of music and poetry, reflecting on the ways nineteenth-century innovations in the world of music resonated with developments in British poetics.” This presentation will be staged as “a conversation between a concert pianist and a scholar of poetry and poetics,” Rudy said, and the evening will “bring together musical performance, poetic recitation, and discussion of the extraordinary intersections of these two great art forms.” Rudy, of course, will be the scholar in the conversation, which is not a stretch, as his academic emphasis is Victorian poetry. For more information about pianist Lura Johnson, visit lurajohnson.com.
