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This production was then performed to a sold-out audience in the Sale Apollinee at Venice’s historic Teatro La Fenice, with an Italian script and Italian actors.
In the 2007-08 season, Imaginings, ERC embarked on a revealing journey through the imaginations of four writers, with The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Tolstoy’s Last Days (Tolstoy), Herself to Her a Music (Emily Dickinson).
In its sixth season, The Paris Project, ERC created a series of four theatrical concerts that evoked the artistic, literary, and political changes that electrified Paris at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In The Dreyfus Affair, ERC created a large political and musical canvas that was later seen again at BAM; Satie: Bohemian from Montmartre; The season ended with a gala performance, at Florence Gould Hall, New York, of Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, a complex multimedia theatrical concert about the famed art collector with music from the 1920’s through the 1980’s. The production was a collaboration with the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA and the French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, New York.
Seduction, Smoke and Music: The Love Story of Chopin and George (2010-2011 season), a theatrical concert written and conceived by Ensemble for the Romantic Century and Barrett Wissman, Executive Producer, Barrett Wissman and IMG Artists was performed in Italy at The Tuscan Sun Festival, with Hollywood superstar Jeremy Irons as Chopin and Sinéad Cusack as George Sand, and with ballet greats Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky of American Ballet Theater.
This same production was featured in the Festival del Sole in Napa Valley on July 19th, 2012. ERC opened its 2013-2014 season with Tchaikovsky: None but the Lonely Heart at BAM Fisher Theater after a critically acclaimed summer debut of the same production at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre in Lenox, MA. This season was concluded with widely praised performances of The Trial of Oscar Wilde at Symphony Space, with Musical America praising it as “one of the best chamber-music concerts I heard this season… thoroughly entertaining.”
ERC’s 2012-2013 season, Monsters, featured performances of Jekyll & Hyde, Dracula, and Frankenstein, explorations of the famed 19th century novels paired with dramatic music.
ERC extended its interdisciplinary scope in the 2009-2010 season, Artists in Exile, with the presentation at Columbia University’s Italian Academy of a Toscanini mini-festival that included a performance of Toscanini: In my Heart too Much of the Absolute, a CUNY seminar with distinguished author and Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs, and a preview showing of the documentary film Toscanini in His Own Words.
In 2005, ERC completed a commission by the Jewish Museum in New York for a production based on the famous Sonntagsmusik salons of Fanny Mendelssohn. The concert, Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of Her Brother’s Shadow, was related to the Jewish Museum’s exhibition The Power of Conversation, showcasing female salonnières from the 18th through the 20th centuries; ERC also served as music consultant for the exhibition. Van Gogh’s Ear, an ERC collaboration with The French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA, and the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal, was performed at Florence Gould Hall, New York, and then in both French and English in Montreal, where it received international acclaim. Strad Magazine hailed the production as “the most intriguing and successful program of the entire festival.”
In 2004, the Ensemble presented The Young Arthur Rubinstein at the Arthur Rubinstein Hall in São Paulo, Brazil during the Eleazar de Carvalho Week, to overwhelming success. In the spring of 2004, Schubert’s Dream was performed while ERC was in residence at Williams College in Massachusetts.