Theodora Serbanescu-Martin: Pianistic Invocations: Liszt's Poetic Harmonies

7 PM Doors & Pre-Reception
8 PM Recital
9:30 PM Post-Reception

Theodora Serbanescu-Martin: Pianistic Invocations: Liszt's Poetic Harmonies

Gotham Arts in collaboration with Groupmuse is delighted to present Pianistic Invocations: Liszt's Poetic Harmonies, an intimate private solo recital by pianist Theodora Serbanescu-Martin featuring the entirety of Liszt's Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, one of the most profound and personal cycles in the piano repertoire. Inspired by Romantic poetry and shaped by Liszt's fascination with ritual, spirituality, and memory, these works explore prayer, mourning, and devotion as lived emotional experiences rather than religious doctrine. Love — of the divine, of the dead, of the absent — runs through the music as a sustaining force.

Blending performance with brief spoken context, the evening is designed as a guided listening experience that invites reflection and conversation. Heard in an intimate salon setting, Liszt’s music becomes a space of invocation and transformation — where sound serves as a bridge between love and loss, solitude and connection.

Wine will be served.

Program

LISZT Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173
1. Invocation
2. Ave Maria
3. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude ("The Blessing of God in Solitude")
4. Pensée des morts ("In Memory of the Dead")
5. Pater Noster
6. Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil ("The Awaking Child’s Hymn")
7. Funérailles (Funeral)
8. Miserere, d'après Palestrina (after Palestrina)
9. La lampe du temple (Andante lagrimoso)
10. Cantique d'Amour ("Hymn of Love")

About the Artist

Watch Theodora perform Brahms' Klavierstücke, Op. 116 on a historic Streicher piano from 1857

Theodora Serbanescu-Martin is a pianist, musicologist, and interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges performance, literary studies, material culture, and the history of embodiment. She is completing her PhD in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University (degree expected spring 2026), and holds dual BA degrees in Music and English, with a minor in German Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her doctoral dissertation, Fashionable Concealments: Myth, Material, and Method in Nineteenth-Century Pianism, reconstructs the piano as a cultural instrument situated at the intersection of fashion, discipline, literature, and technique. Moving beyond genealogical narratives of virtuosity, the project examines how bodies, clothing, and technologies shaped Romantic ideals of expression, authenticity, and labor. This research forms the basis of her forthcoming book project, Fashioning Pianism: The Media of Romantic Virtuosity. Her scholarship will also appear in the Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies (Oxford University Press), with a chapter titled "Effortful Reductions: Brahms’s Piano Transcriptions and the Notation of (Dis)Ability," and in the Nineteenth-Century Music Review.

At Cornell, Theodora served as assistant curator for the exhibition Sounding Fashion and was the organizer of the conference-festival Performing Clara Schumann. Her research has been supported by the American Musicological Society's Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund, the Institute for European Studies, the Timothy Murray Fellowship, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. She regularly presents lecture-recitals and conference papers that integrate historicist reading, performance analysis, and archival work.

As a performer, Theodora identifies as a "Romantic pianist" — a term she uses to describe an approach grounded in nineteenth-century aesthetics of flexibility, virtuosity, improvisation, and expressive risk, while remaining critically aware of Romanticism's afterlives and ideological consequences. Her performances do not claim historical "authenticity," but instead treat Romantic materials as living, mediated practices shaped by context, technology, and embodiment. She is particularly interested in how visual, literary, and material dimensions—dress, gesture, space, and staging—shape musical meaning.

She has appeared internationally throughout Europe and the United States and has performed with ensembles including the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Peninsula Symphony, the Saratoga Symphony, the Lublin Philharmonic, and the Kostroma Symphony with repertoire such as Brahms's Second and Prokofiev's Second concertos, as well as extra-canonical repertoire. Currently, she is working on a recording and critical edition of Hélène de Montgeroult's seminal but forgotten method Cours complet pour l’enseignement du forte piano, while preparing performances of Marie Jaëll's rarely heard first concerto, Liszt's De Profundis psalm-concerto, and other virtuoso repertoire including Alkan. Her performance work has been recognized with prizes at competitions such as the International Los Angeles Liszt Competition, IPC Sussex, and MTAC competitions, and with scholarships at festivals such as the Dublin International, American Fine Arts Festival, and Freiburg International, and the California Summer Music chamber festival. She collaborates regularly with historical keyboard collections, including Cornell's Center for Historical Keyboards, the Westfield Center, and the Ira F. Brilliant Beethoven Center, and is currently in town for the event The Sociable Fortepiano, where she is presenting work on nineteenth-century finger-strengthening devices, Romantic virtuosity, and fashion at the keyboard.

What's the music?

Theodora Serbanescu-Martin

Where does this music come from?

Attendees

+2

Kate K.

Bill R.

David G.

+1

Michael M.

Danil K.

George S.

+1

Brian K.

+1

Aca G.

Dan C.

+1

Mary S.

Westin C.