DESCRIPTION:
In this special performance at the Clark, Ross plays the piano designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema for the Marquand Music Room in honor of the special exhibition Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and Design

Dubbed the “Crown Prince of New York cabaret,” Steve Ross has played in virtually all of the world’s fabled clubs from New York and London to Sydney and Saŏ Paolo and is widely considered one of the greatest interpreters of Broadway and American standards. Although he’ll be playing a much younger piano, Ross will evoke all of the glamour of the piano’s storied past. Enjoy sophisticated song stylings as Ross pays musical tribute to some of America’s greatest composers, including works by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim, among many others.

In 1884 the American industrialist Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902) commissioned noted British artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) to design a Greco-Pompeiian music room for his new Madison Avenue mansion. It was an era when designing luxurious rooms in different styles—Renaissance, Moorish, Japanese, French—was popular among the affluent, and this trend was well represented in other mansions being built along the fashionable avenues in New York. Although Alma-Tadema was most famous as a painter of scenes set in antiquity, he was also known for the imaginative interiors of his own residences. The Marquand music room commission resulted in one of the most evocative interiors of late nineteenth-century New York, featuring a suite of elaborately inlaid furniture alongside textiles, paintings, sculptures, and ancient ceramics in a room that showed off Marquand’s collections while serving as a center for social events and musical performances Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and Design (June 4 – September 4, 2017) looks at the history of this exceptional moment in Alma-Tadema’s career and reunites many of the extraordinary components of this lost room for the first time in more than a century.