DEERFIELD — Piano music will fill Memorial Hall for a special concert at 3 p.m. Sunday in the music room.
The concert, put on by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, is in celebration of the room’s 100th anniversary and the 130th anniversary of the hall’s Steinway grand piano. According to a news release, the program will feature “music for four-hands,” a two-person performance by pianists Julia Bady and Jamie Goodnow.
The duo will perform “Four Slavonic Dances” by Dvorak; “Fantastic in F-minor, D.940” by Schubert; and the “Dolly Suite, Op. 57” by Faure.
“Four-handed piono was quite popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries,” said Tim Neumann, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association executive director. “Composers wrote in this genre for home or salon performance, offering increased scope for textural variety and making possible more elaborate piano versions of orchestral music.”
Bady is “a concert pianist and piano teacher based in Greenfield,” and Goodnow works in western Massachusetts as a “concert pianist, accompanist and teacher.”
Tickets for the show, at $10 for adults and $5 for students, are available at the door on a first-come basis.
According to the statement the music room was added to a former Deerfield Academy building (built in 1799, purchased by the memorial association in 1872) in 1916. It was dedicated to Deerfield town historian and memorial association founder George Sheldon, who was 98 years old at the time, the same year.
Neumann said the project was funded through donations by Jennie Arms Sheldon, second wife of founder George Sheldon. Neumann said she was “daughter of the wealthy Greenfield businessman George A. Arms, owner of the five-story George A. Arms Block in downtown … now known by some as the Arts Block.”
The piano has been in Deerfield since 1886, Neumann said, when it was “purchased by Jane Isabella Williams Thatcher from Steinert Piano Co. in Boston and shipped to her Eaglebrook Lodge, now Eaglebrook School.”