Romantic Music afternoon and evening with the Ciompi Quartet at Berea College Feb. 15

The Ciompi Quartet will perform “Valentine’s Special: Love Notes,” a concert of music from the Romantic period Feb. 15 at Berea College. The 8 p.m. concert is scheduled in Phelps Stokes Chapel on Berea’s campus.The Quartet was founded at Duke University in 1965 by the renowned Italian violinist Giorgio Ciompi. All its members serve on the faculty at Duke, in addition to traveling widely throughout the year for performances. Concerts by the Ciompi Quartet are known for musical sophistication and for a warm, unified sound that is enhanced by the players’ strong individual voices. The group’s repertoire ranges from well-known masterpieces to works by today’s most communicative composers.

In addition to the Quartet’s evening concert, an afternoon “Informance” is scheduled at 3 p.m., also in Phelps Stokes. In an entertaining lecture, Bryan Gilliam, Frances Hill Fox Professor in Humanities at Duke, will explain the Romantic elements of classical music while the musicians perform samples.

Eric Prichard, first violin; Hsiao-Mei Ku, second violin, and the sole woman; Jonathan Bagg, viola, and Fred Raimi, cello, make up the Ciompi Quartet. Together, they perform some 80 concerts each year, presenting as many as 40 different pieces. The group has played on five continents, with recent appearances in Europe, China, Latin American, Israel and Albania and coast to coast in the U.S. In the summer, the quartet performs at Monadnock Music in New Hampshire and the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Michigan.

Recent musical collaborators have included such distinguished talents as pianists Menahem Pressler and James Tocco, and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, to soprano Susan Narucki and jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon. The Quartet’s CDs span the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, up through the present. Their most recent release is of 20th century music for quartet and voice. For more, visit www.ciompi.org

The concert is free and open to the public and is part of the Stephenson Memorial Concert Series for 2006-07. The Stephenson Memorial Concert Fund was established by the family of the late John B. Stephenson, former president of Berea College, and honors Stephenson and his sister Nancy Anne.