Photo Credit: New York Public Library
Celebrated cellist Theodore Buchholz, joined by pianist Calvin Hu, will perform the cello and piano works of American composer Henry Hadley (1871–1937). The program draws on manuscripts held in the Library’s own archive and brings them back to New York for the first time in a century.
In 2017, Buchholz began exploring Hadley’s manuscripts at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and found a collection of a dozen substantial works for cello and piano that had gone unheard for a hundred years. Hadley, one of the most performed American composers of his era, wrote in an unapologetically Romantic voice even as the broader musical world was turning toward modernism. The program takes its title from one of these rediscovered works, Afterglow, a piece that Buchholz describes as capturing Hadley’s devotion to a Romantic aesthetic whose sun had already set.
The discovery led to a full recording project: Afterglow: The Forgotten Works for Cello and Piano by Henry Hadley, released by Centaur Records to widespread critical acclaim. At the Library for the Performing Arts, Buchholz and Hu will perform selections from that recording and from the archive, with Buchholz narrating the story of Hadley, the history of the archive itself, and his own decade-long relationship with this music.
