ARCA’s audience leapt to its feet with thunderous applause and BRAVOS on Sunday, May 4, 2025 for poetic and passionate BEETHOVEN in the hands of internationally acclaimed pianist David Allen Wehr and Pittsburgh Symphony’s Principal Cellist, Anne Martindale Williams in Foxburg’s Lincoln Hall.
Charming the audience with humor and rich insights into Beethoven’s writing, Wehr is the consummate “Living Program Note” from his 13 seasons touring the US & Canada with Community Concert. Relating the similarity between the turbulent times in which Beethoven lived and ours today, David noted that his message of humanity – “every man is our brother”- is as relevant and meaningful today as it was then, because “Beethoven speaks to our better angels.”
Wehr’s performance was “on fire” and “one of those” – as he was “in the flow” and the audience felt it. He dedicated his two sonatas – the ‘Pastoral” followed by the Pathetique – to Dr. Arthur Steffee and Patricia Steffee in this Founders Concert. Wehr was a friend and favorite of the Steffee’s, performing frequently in Lincoln Hall and the Steffee homes.
The partnership of Wehr and Williams was consummate and ‘hand in glove’ – with their sweet expressivity and dazzling virtuosity in Variations on “Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes,” from Handel’s “Judas Maccabeus” for Cello and Piano and the third cello sonata, opus 69. The Handel theme of the variations is based on the Easter hymn, “Thine Be the Glory” – so perfect for the post-Easter season
After the concert, David and Anne met audience members in the Red Brick Gallery.
The place was packed – for the opening reception and poetry reading in the RBG for the exhibit, “The Vandalia in Me” featuring photos and poetry of Greg Clary – who, in the words of poet Philip Terman, “understands the “hero in every soul.”
Glowing Beethoven audience members from the Lincoln Hall concert and and poetry lovers celebrated the vision of Greg Clary: “These images and words share the common theme of seeking beauty among the ordinary and infusing them with respect and significance.”
Introduced by RBG Artistic Director, Jason Floyd Lewis, Greg gave insights into the characters and happenings that were his muse, and read poems from his book, “The Vandalia in Me”, which is on sale in the gallery along with his photographs.
Friends and fans nodded and laughed as his poetic images captured the Appalachian world where he had lived on his family’s homestead in southern West Virginia and then for 40 years in the northwestern Pennsylvania Wilds.
Dave Newman who wrote the introduction to Clary’s book writes of his Vandalia,
“It’s a wild place filled with love and dreams. His world is… filled with deer hunting, rivers, and family. Biscuits and fried green tomatoes. It is hospital visits and rough bars and demolition derby. I’ve never seen poor and working-class folks and the places they go to save themselves photographed with such honesty. The shots of even the most rundown bars are filled with the brightness of dreams and possibility”
Plan to come in and linger with his photographs and poems – and have the complete APPALACHIAN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE going from the exhibit at 17 Main Street, Foxburg, to hear MISSY RAINES & ALLEGHENY – WHO ALSO HAILS FROM WV – on Saturday, May 17 at 7:30 PM next door in Lincoln Hall.
