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CONRAD TAO, PIANO The only classical musician on Forbes’ 2011 “30 Under 30” list of people changing theworld, 18-year-old Chinese-American pianist Conrad Tao was found playing children’s songs on the piano at 18 months of age. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he gave his first piano recital at age 4; four years later, he made his concerto debut performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 414. In June of 2011, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and the Department of Education named Conrad a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, while the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him a YoungArts gold medal in music. Later that year, Conrad was named a Gilmore Young Artist, an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. In May of 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. In January of 2012, Conrad’s performance of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was hailed by the Detroit News as “a blazing debut…a performance no less seductive in its lyrical beauty than hair-raising in its technical brilliance.” Following a recital at Carnegie’s Weill Hall in February of 2012, the New York Times wrote of the “lovely colors and poetic nuances” of his Liszt, and the eloquence and “fiery panache” of his Prokofiev. Later that year, in June, a writer for All Things Strings attended Conrad’s performance at the Montréal Chamber Music Festival and noted that “Tao is ready for his own TV show: he plays music as if the composer were at his side, with color, joy, and spontaneous poetry. He composes, studies, researches, writes…like that whiz kid on the West Coast, Conrad Tao should be licensed to operate by the time he’s 21.” Sporting a truly international career, Conrad has appeared as soloist in the United States with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, and the Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, and San Francisco Symphonies, among others. He has made multiple tours of Europe, giving solo recitals in Paris, London, Munich, Berlin, and Verbier, and performed with orchestras in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Moscow, and Singapore. Highlights of his 2012-2013 season include two more tours of Europe, including a concerto debut at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and a third reëngagement at the Louvre in Paris, appearances at the Mostly Mozart and Aspen Music Festivals, debuts with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada and a return to Asia with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and performances of all five Beethoven piano concertos in the United States. As an accomplished composer, Conrad has won eight consecutive ASCAP Morton GouldYoung Composer Awards since 2004; he also received BMI’s Carlos Surinach prize in 2005. For the 2012-2013 season, Conrad has been commissioned by the Hong Kong Philharmonic to write a concert overture ringing in their new season – frequent colleague Jaap von Zweden’s inaugural season there as music director – as well as celebrating the region’s annual China Day. He was also asked by the Dallas Symphony to compose a work observing the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which will be performed in November of 2013. As an award-winning violinist, Conrad has performed with orchestras in Pennsylvania and Florida; in 2009, he gave nine performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor (followed by Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor in the second half) with the Symphony of the Americas in Boca Raton. Conrad’s violin prowess was featured on Jackie Evancho’s Dream With Me PBS special, on which Conrad also traded spots with David Foster behind the piano. Conrad is an exclusive EMI recording artist. His first album, released as an iTunes exclusive in February of 2012 as part of the “Juilliard Sessions” series, comprised works by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Conrad himself. His second record will also prominently feature Conrad’s own compositions, and is expected for release in 2013. Conrad currently attends the Columbia University/Juilliard School joint degree program and studies piano with Professors Yoheved Kaplinsky and Choong Mo Kang at Juilliard. He studies composition with Professor Christopher Theofanidis of Yale University, and studied violin with Ms. Catherine Cho for five years at Juilliard’s Pre-College Division.

September 24, 2017: Rafael Figueroa, cello GASPAR CASSADÓ (1897-1966) Sardana and Jota from Suite for Solo Cello September 24, 2017: Rafael Figueroa, cello Young prodigy Gaspar Cassadó began his music training early with his organist-composer father. The family moved to Paris to insure the best teachers—the great Jacques Thibaud for his violinist brother and Casals for him. Casals’s playing and mentoring left an indelible impression on the young Gaspar, who became acquainted with all the leading musicians in Paris—he also studied composition with Ravel and Falla. Influenced by his mentor’s legendary performances of the Bach solo cello suites, Cassadó composed one of his own in 1926, successfully transferring the idea of Bach’s stylized Baroque dances to dance forms of his own Spanish heritage. The Sardana, reflecting the national Catalonian circle dance, unfolds in two parts: slow and stately (dancer holding hands with arms down) and fast and exuberant (arms up). The final movement alternates an introspective Intermezzo with a lively triple-meter Jota, which evokes the guitars and castanets of the dance’s northern Spanish roots. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

December 19, 2017: Alessio Bax, piano; Lucille Chung, piano WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI (1913-1994) Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos December 19, 2017: Alessio Bax, piano; Lucille Chung, piano After Stalin’s death in 1953, Witold Lutosławski, along with Krzysztof Penderecki, led Polish composers in a great renaissance, bringing recognition to Polish music that had been lacking since the days of Chopin. Lutosławski had concurrently studied composition at the Warsaw Conservatory and mathematics at the University of Warsaw. In the 1960s he became internationally known as a conductor of his own works and taught and lectured on composition in Europe and the United States. Lutosławski’s style went through many stages—a folk music stage greatly influenced by Bartók, a twelve-tone phase, and a period in which he developed his own system that permitted him, he said, “to move within the scope of twelve tones, outside both the tonal system and conventional dodecaphony.” In the 1960s he became interested in aleatory techniques to enhance textural effects, not, as he said, “to free myself of part of my responsibility for the work by transferring it to the players,” but to achieve “a particular result in sound.” His exceptional attention to structure and detail and his careful working methods resulted in long periods of revision and polishing for most works—ten years in the case of the Third Symphony. His list of works, therefore, is relatively short, but each is of consistently high quality. During the Second World War, Lutosławski played piano in cafés (kawiarnie ) in order to make a living and as a means of public expression. He sometimes accompanied other artists and often performed together with composer and conductor Andrzej Panufnik in a duo piano team. Their concerts included light and serious music of all periods from Bach to Debussy, in arrangements on which he and Panufnik had collaborated. More than 200 of these arrangements were destroyed in the Warsaw Uprising, but one survived, the Wariacje na temat Paganiniego (Variations on a theme of Paganini), an arrangement by Lutosławski alone, which he published after the war. As in all their arrangements, one part was harder than the other, because Lutosławski was a better pianist than Panufnik; Lutosławski took the first piano part in the present arrangement. The Paganini theme is the famous one from the twenty-fourth Caprice for solo violin, which Paganini himself was the first to vary, and which has since attracted numerous composers, such as Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Blacher, Ginastera, Rochberg, and popular composers John Dankworth and Andrew Lloyd Webber. But where the most famous of these works—the Brahms and Rachmaninoff—present original variations on the theme, Lutosławski’s follows Paganini’s model closely; that is, Lutosławski “transcribed” Paganini’s variations. That is not to say Lutosławski’s Variations sound like products of the Romantic era—instead he used great imagination and twentieth-century vocabulary in transferring the violinistic passages to two pianos. The rapid string crossings in the second variation, for example, become rapidly alternating chromatically neighboring chords, and the thirds and tenths in the sixth variation are treated in canon and inversion with widely spaced triads in the first piano and octaves a third apart in the second piano. Though Lutosławski keeps the piece grounded in A minor, he introduces striking harmonic deviations, juxtapositions, and superimpositions. The first half of the second half of the theme, for example, begins in A major in the first piano while the second piano begins in E-flat, a tritone away. Lutosławski decided to trade Paganini’s arpeggiated conclusion for a brilliant, elaborate restatement of the theme—amounting to another variation—which is capped by a coda that increases in volume and speed to the end. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 18, 2009 – David Chan, violin; Jeewon Park, piano, Rafael Figueroa, cello JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Trio in B Major, Op. 8, for violin, cello, and piano October 18, 2009 – David Chan, violin; Jeewon Park, piano, Rafael Figueroa, cello Johannes Brahms’ Piano Trio, Opus 8, is in many respects a paradoxical work. Progressing from a radiant B major to a tragic B minor, the piece juxtaposes passages of luxurious warmth and optimism and music of turbulence and despair. It is also, in the version heard most often today, simultaneously one of Brahms’ earliest and latest works. He had already started composing the trio in 1853, when the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim gave the 20-year-old Brahms a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann. Brahms’ meeting with the Schumanns at their Düsseldorf home marked an important turning point in his life and career. The Schumanns received him with enormous enthusiasm and generosity. They invited him to stay with them for several weeks, initiating a close friendship that would last for the rest of their lives. Schumann wrote glowingly about the younger composer in his influential journal The New Leipzig Musical Times, and he introduced Brahms to the head of the prominent music publishing firm Breitkopf & Härtel. This greatly enhanced Brahms’ prospects for a successful composing career. The following February, while still working on the trio, Brahms received the distressing news of Robert Schumann’s suicide attempt. He hastened back to Düsseldorf to comfort the Schumann family. It was under those dark circumstances that he completed the piece later that year. Perhaps this brush with tragedy associated with his mentor altered the emotional trajectory of the work, diverting it from its luminous B-major beginning and setting on the course towards its stormy B-minor conclusion. Toward the end of his life Brahms, now the most respected of living composers, changed music publishers. Fritz Simrock bought the rights to all of Brahms’ works from Breitkopf & Härtel for the purpose of publishing them in a new edition. Simrock offered Brahms the opportunity to revise some of his earliest works for the release of the new edition. Brahms, ever the perfectionist – he had burned his first twenty string quartets and postponed composing his first symphony until his mid-40s – decided to revisit his 35-year-old trio, Op. 8. After performing the new version in 1890, Brahms wrote to a friend, saying, “Do you still remember the B major trio from our early days, and wouldn’t you be curious to hear it now, as I have (instead of placing a wig on it!) taken the hair and combed and ordered it a bit…?” This was quite an understatement. In fact, he had shortened the overall length of the work by a third, substantially rewriting the middle sections of the first, third, and fourth movements. Only the Scherzo remained essentially unchanged from its original version. The final work seamlessly blends the impetuosity and passion of his youth with the technical assurance and architectural mastery of his maturity. The first movement begins like a cello sonata, unleashing a glorious cello melody that continues for 23 measures before it is finally joined by the violin. The atmosphere of the movement is wise and reassuring, demonstrating that, even at an early age, his musical sensibilities were already well-formed and recognizably “Brahmsian.” The Scherzo begins in a stealthily portentous B minor. Compressed staccato phrases are interwoven with longer thematic threads that foreshadow surprises ahead. Sudden fortissimo outbursts crash through the texture, dissolving into delicate piano filigree and quiet passagework in the strings. The contrasting trio introduces a melody of expansive warmth and maturity. The third movement alternates between solemn piano and string chorales, eventually blending the two into a sustained, meditative texture. The music then gives way to a long-lined, soulful cello solo. The solemn chorale textures return toward the end of the movement, now accompanied by ethereal ornaments in the right hand of the piano. The final movement is a musical battle between hope and despair. A quietly agitated opening explodes into major-key passages of great exuberance and exultation. Finally, though, the music retreats back into agitation and concern, and the trio concludes in a burst of stormy, B-minor turbulence. By Michael Parloff Return to Parlance Program Notes

September 25, 2016: Jason Vieaux, guitar FRANCISCO TÁRREGA (1852–1909) Capricho árabe September 25, 2016: Jason Vieaux, guitar At the age of ten Tárrega studied classical guitar with Julian Arcas, followed by training at the Madrid Conservatory, where he also studied theory, harmony, and piano. He soon began to teach and at the same time establish himself as a guitar virtuoso. His international reputation grew after successful appearances in Paris and London in 1880; he was acclaimed as “the Sarasate of the guitar.” Tárrega did much to promote the instrument at a time when the piano had almost completely overshadowed it. He not only composed some eighty original works for the guitar—Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Capricho árabe, and Danza mora are among his best-known solo pieces—but he transcribed over 140 works by other composers for one or two guitars, including pieces by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Granados, and Albéniz. Albéniz once stated that Tárrega’s transcriptions were better than his own piano originals! Tárrega’s extremely popular Capricho árabe, composed after a trip to Granada, is dedicated to his friend and composer Tomás Bretón. A brief introduction—an isolated open fourth, an improvisatory riff, a brief chordal motive, all repeated—precedes Tárrega’s well-known melody with its signature beginning of two repeated notes. The accompanimental pattern of four bass notes with afterbeat chords is intriguing to follow as it changes harmonically to introduce new sections. The main theme alternates between presentations in minor and in major, with periodic improvisatory passages providing further contrast. A shortened return of the melody in minor closes the piece. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

JAMIE BERNSTEIN, HOST Jamie Bernstein is an author, narrator, director, broadcaster, and filmmaker. Her 2018 memoir, Famous Father Girl , is about growing up with composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, and pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre in an atmosphere bursting with music, theatre and literature. Jamie has written and narrated concerts about Mozart, Aaron Copland, and Stravinsky, as well as “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father modeled after his groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts. She appears worldwide performing her own scripted narrations as well as standard concert narrations, such as Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” and her father’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.” Jamie has produced and hosted the New York Philharmonic’s live national radio broadcasts, as well as many summer broadcasts from Tanglewood. She recently narrated the podcast “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York.” Jamie is the co-director of Crescendo: the Power of Music , an award-winning documentary film focusing on children in struggling urban communities, who participate in youth orchestra programs for social transformation. Jamie’s articles and poetry have appeared in such publications as Symphony, Town & Country, and Opera News. She also edits “Prelude, Fugue & Riffs,” a newsletter pertaining to her father’s legacy.

January 29, 2023: Danish String Quartet WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Divertimento in F, K. 138 January 29, 2023: Danish String Quartet Mozart’s Divertimento in F major, K. 125c, is one of a set of three written in Salzburg during the winter months of 1772, after Mozart had returned from his second journey to Italy. The Italian influence certainly seems present in these works, for they all use the three-movement structure then popular in Italian symphonies, direct descendants of the three-part opera overtures. Clear echoes can also be perceived of the young Mozart’s most admired composers, Joseph Haydn and Johann Christian Bach. The F major Divertimento’s first movement follows sonata form, as do most of the movements in these Divertimentos. The interplay between the two violin parts is especially striking. The lovely slow movement, also in sonata form, contains a truly melting second theme: long held notes in the two violins, reached each time by leap in a dotted rhythm, culminating in suspensions against contrasting figuration in the lower voices. The sparkling Presto finale, a rondo, is all too brief. The presence and character of the minor episode in the finale is particularly reminiscent of J. C. Bach. These three Divertimentos, K. 125a, b, and c (K. 136–138), present interesting questions similar to those surrounding the famous Eine kleine Nachtmusik: it is not clear whether these works were meant to be performed as string quartets or by larger string ensembles. Though they sound equally compelling in both settings, historical evidence suggests that Mozart envisioned them being played with one on a part—not, though, by the typical string quartet, but the “divertimento quartet” comprised of two violins, viola, and bass. The illustration on the title page of Mozart’s Musical Joke shows such a quartet with the addition of two horns. The matter was not of great importance to Mozart, and the great Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein suggested that Mozart and his father might have taken the Divertimentos along to Milan, and if asked for a new symphony could have simply added oboe and horn parts. Scholars even differ as to the correct title of the Divertimentos—the alternate names of “Quartett-Divertimenti” and “Salzburg-Symphonies” have been used; the title “Divertimento” on the original autograph was not written in Mozart’s hand. If, however, one takes the broadest definition of the word divertimento, namely entertainment or amusement, these works provide just that. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

May 15, 2016: James Morris, bass-baritone; Ken Noda, piano GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685-1759) Hear me, ye winds and waves from Scipione and Giulio Cesare, Del minacciar del vento from Ottone May 15, 2016: James Morris, bass-baritone; Ken Noda, piano Always able to compose quickly when circumstances demanded, Handel wrote Scipione in just three weeks, completing the opera only ten days before the first performance on March 12, 1726, at the King’s Theatre in London. He had planned to present Alessandro, but had to come up with a new opera when one of his singers had to arrive too late. Not only did he have to borrow music from some of his recorder sonatas for the overture, but at the last minute had to remove a role and alter Paolo Antonio Rolli’s already hastily prepared libretto when one of the already assembled cast dropped out. It is no wonder that he made extensive revisions for a 1730 revival, which became almost a pastiche with the inclusion of fourteen numbers from his earlier operas. The creation of the recitative and aria “Hear me, ye winds and waves” mirrors the kind of assembly that produced Scipione. In Act II, Scene 2, the imprisoned Princess Berenice (soprano) sings the gently martial but lamenting aria, “Tutta raccolta ancor” (Still wholly contained) while awaiting her captor Scipio, who loves her, though she loves Lucejo. In the late nineteenth century British composer, semiprofessional baritone, and poet Theo Marzials and composer/arranger Amelia Lehmann (known by the inititals A. L.) took the music from this aria and, setting it for low voice, fit it with the English words “Hear me, ye winds and waves”—Marzials’s translation of “Aure, deh, per pietà spirate,” an aria in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. (Handel’s original Caesar was sung by an alto castrato, but is now often performed by a baritone.) Marzials preceded the aria (music from Scipione, words from Giulio Cesare translated into English) with the recitative “Dall’ondo periglio,” which he translated as “From the rage of the tempest” and which had introduced “Aure, deh, per pietà spirate” in Giulio Cesare. Caesar sings his Act III recitative and aria after surviving a drowning attempt and being washed ashore—he tells of his escape, laments the loss of his legions and his glory, and prays for an end to his misery. Thus the English recitative and aria known as “Hear me, ye winds and waves,” actually contains more words and measures of music from Giulio Ceasre, though the memorable music of the aria portion has become so beloved that the selection is always billed as from Scipione. Though originally a lament for Berenice, the music serves Caesar’s purpose equally well, a transference Handel himself could easily have appreciated. The Marzials/Lehmann piano vocal arrangement, published in 1895, has become a popular recital selection. * * * * * Handel composed Ottone in the summer of 1722 for premiere at the King’s Theatre, but he had to make numerous revisions before the opening on January 12, 1723, because of complaints from the illustrious cast about their roles. Nicola Francsco Haym had adapted the libretto—somewhat clumsily according to critics—from that of Stefano Benedetti Pallavicino for Antonio Lotti’s 1719 Teofano, and further segmenting during Handel’s setting caused disjointedness of the drama. But the opera turned out to be one of the most popular of Handel’s career, in large part because of the music’s merits. The plot revolves around a true event, the marriage of Otto II of Germany to Princess Theofano of the Eastern Empire in Rome in 972. Pallavicino, and hence Haym, added story elements concerning Berengar’s suppressed attempt to overthrow Otto I in 950 and the 976 succession of Basil II to the Eastern Empire throne. The blustery bass aria “Del minacciar del vento” (The threats of the wind) is sung in Act I, Scene 4, by the pirate Emireno (Emirenus) who has delayed Ottone (Otto) on his way to Rome to be married, but whom Ottone has captured. Emireno hints that he is someone important (actually Teofane’s brother, which he doesn’t reveal) and boasts that he will always retain his pride just before he is dragged off to prison. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

February 18, 2024: Michael Stephen Brown, piano Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) The Valley of the Bells for piano February 18, 2024: Michael Stephen Brown, piano In his autobiographical sketch Ravel said that his Miroirs of 1904–05 “mark a change in my harmonic development pronounced enough to have upset those musicians who till then had had the least trouble in appreciating my style.” He no doubt referred to his freedom to avoid the home key for long stretches and to use passages of unresolved chords over pedal points. Ravel’s formal structures in these five “mirrors” of nature were also freer than in his earlier works. When pianist Ricardo Viñes told him that Debussy dreamed of writing “a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound improvised” (never minding old improvisatory-sounding forms such as fantasias and toccatas!), Ravel told Viñes that he, too, was working along similar principles. Several weeks later Ravel played his free-sounding Miroirs for the Apaches, his circle of Parisian artists. Ravel dedicated each of the five Miroirs to a fellow Apache—the last of the set, La vallée des cloches, to his only pupil, Maurice Delage. Viñes premiered Miroirs on January 6, 1906, at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique to mixed reviews, as might be expected in view of Ravel’s remarkable new direction. La vallée des cloches, Ravel told pianist Robert Casadesus, was inspired by the sound of the Parisian church bells that rang at noon, and, reported Gabriel Fauré, Ravel referred to the bell sound at the end as “la Savoyarde,” the largest bell in the Basilica of Montmartre. Ravel would go on to feature bells in a number of his other works, such as L’heure espagnole, La cathédrale engloutie, and Gaspard de la nuit. The outer sections of La vallée des cloches depicts five sets of bells, repeating in fragmented phrases at varying rates, with intervals of parallel fourths and octaves prominent to suggest the overtones in the bells’ reverberations. Only in the middle section does a lush melody emerge. Striking but less obvious is Ravel’s use of larger structural planes, extended in time to create varied overarching patterns, much in the same way the Cubists were breaking up time and space to create illusions of solid objects. Ravel required three staves in the score to facilitate the representation of these layers. He was particular, as pianist Henriette Faure learned in a coaching, that the right-hand carillon and the left-hand high octave bells sound on two very distinct levels, “and the whole thing had to remain within a pianissimo that he could, in some mysterious way, achieve without it sounding feeble. . . . The great calm lyrical outpouring [of the central section], on the other hand, requires a profound sonority and a legato that comes from a hand closely wedded to the keys, and from a weight of arm that one ideally gets from sitting rather low at the keyboard.” —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

GUILLERMO FIGUEROA, VIOLA One of the most versatile and respected musical artists of his generation – renowned as conductor, violinist, violist, and concertmaster – Guillermo Figueroa is the Principal Conductor of the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra. He is also the Music Director of the Music in the Mountains Festival in Colorado and Music Director of the Lynn Philharmonia in Florida. Additionally, he was the Music Director of both the New Mexico Symphony and the Puerto Rico Symphony . International appearances, among others, include the Toronto Symphony, Iceland Symphony, Orquesta Sinfonica de Chile and the National Symphony of Mexico . In the US he has appeared with the orchestras of Buffalo, Detroit, New Jersey, Memphis, Phoenix, Tucson and the New York City Ballet . As violinist, his recording of Ernesto Cordero’s violin concertos for the Naxos label received a Latin Grammy nomination in 2012. Figueroa was Concertmaster of the New York City Ballet , and a Founding Member and Concertmaster of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra , making over fifty recordings for Deutsche Grammophon . Also accomplished on the viola, Figueroa performs frequently as guest of the Fine Arts, Emerson, American, and Orion string quartets. Figueroa has given the world premieres of four violin concertos written for him: the Concertino by Mario Davidovsky, at Carnegie Hall with Orpheus ; the Double Concerto by Harold Farberman, with the American Symphony at Fisher Hall , Lincoln Center; the Violin Concerto by Miguel del Aguila, commissioned by Figueroa and the NMSO and Insula , by Ernesto Cordero with the Solisti di Zagreb in Zagreb.

March 9, 2025: Ravel’s 150th Birthday Concert, with Erika Baikoff, Soprano; Soohong Park, piano Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Shéherazade for soprano and piano March 9, 2025: Ravel’s 150th Birthday Concert, with Erika Baikoff, Soprano; Soohong Park, piano While still a student at the Paris Conservatory in 1899, Ravel conceived an opera to be based on the tales of the Thousand and One Nights . Well-aware of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), Ravel wrote his own Shéhérazade Overture based on the legends, but the work’s lack of success when Ravel conducted it that June gave him pause, and he prohibited it from being published. Then in 1903 he was inspired to set three poems by fellow member of the Apache society Tristan Klingsor (pseudonym of Leon Leclerc), whose cycle entitled Shéhérazade had just been published. Wrote Leclerc: Ravel immediately announced his intent of setting some of my poems into music. His love of difficulty led him to choose, in addition to “L’indifférent and La flûte enchantée , one which, by reason of its length and narrative form, seemed the least likely suited for his purpose: Asie . The fact is that at this time he was extremely preoccupied with the challenge of adapting music to speech, heightening its accents and inflections and magnifying them by adapting them into melody; and to assist him to carry out his project he asked me to read the poems out loud to him. Like much of France and other European countries at the turn of the twentieth century, Ravel was fascinated with evocations of the Far East. The interest was not so much a kind of armchair tourism, but rather represented in the words of musicologist Kurt Oppens—whose knowledge of French poetry was second to none—“the decadence of a hypercivilized culture.” Worth quoting at length, Oppens wrote: Concerning decadence : all such once-fashionable catch names and slogans isolate one single element that, in truth, is common to all art. Every new style is “decadent” in the sense that it pays the price of progress by falling off from a previous achievement. Ravel’s Shéhérazade , however, is decadence with a capital D, a prototypical example of what Decadence as a movement was about. The kind of travel described in a poem such as Asie leads out of the boundaries of the self into archetypal images, a world of subconscious dreams, or eroticism and murder, a mixture that in its concrete political embodiments, led to the unspeakable tragedies of [the twentieth] century. . . . The emotonal-musical climax coincides with these words: “Je voudrais voir des rose et du sang; / Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine .” (I would like to see roses and blood; / I would like to see those who die for love or else for hate.” . . . The “I” of Leclerc’s poem does not think of dying; he is looking at death and responding to it as if it were a stimulant, an aphrodisiac. . . . Ravel’s music for “Asie” is essentially one big rolling wave, a masterfully articulated and controlled crescendo and decrescendo. (The element of control is of course non-decadent; decadent art is in itself a contradictory or dialectical proposition.) It is fascinating that when Ravel conducted these songs himself, he began with “Le flûte enchantée,” followed by “L’indifférent,” and ended with “Asie,” as in the order of the premiere, which was sung by Jane Hatto of the Paris Opéra on May 17, 1904, with Alfred Cortot conducting the orchestra of the Société Nationale. The published order makes for a more subdued ending, in keeping with the intimate love songs of “La flûte enchantée” and “L’indifférent.” Of the two shorter songs, “La flûte enchantée” offers an intimate melody—often sad, occasionally joyful—evoking the thoughts of the poem’s slave girl, who in her master’s house hears her lover playing the flute. “L’indifferent” also unfolds as a private love song, one shrouded in an air of mystery both as to the poem and Ravel’s setting. Is the protagonist Scherherazade herself seducing a young boy or is the androgenous nature of the addressee something that attracted Ravel? Whatever the case, Ravel skillfully captures the elusive, maybe dreamed or imagined-from-afar seductiveness of the poem. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Texts and Translations Asie Asie, Asie, Asie, Vieux pays merveilleux des contes de nourrice Où dort la fantasie comme une impératrice En sa forêt tout emplie de mystère. Asie, Je voudrais m'en aller avec la goélette Qui se berce ce soir dans la port, Mystérieuse et solitaire, Et qui déploie enfin ses voiles violettes Comme un immense oiseau de nuit dans le ciel d’or. Je voudrais m’en aller vers des îles de fleurs En écoutant chanter la mer perverse Sur un vieux rythme ensorceleur, Je voudrais voir Damas et les villes de Perse Avec les minarets légers dans l’air, Je voudrais voir de beaux turbans de soie Sur des visages noirs aux dents claires; Je voudrais voir des yeux sombres d’amour Et des prunelles brillantes de joie En des peaux jaunes comme des oranges; Je voudrais voir des vêtements de velours Et des habits à longues franges, Je voudrais voir des calumets entre les bouches Tout entourées de barbe blanche; Je voudrais voir d’âpres marchands aux regards louches, Et des cadis, et des vizirs Qui du seul mouvement de leur doigt qui se penche Accordent vie ou mort au gré de leur désir. Je voudrais voir la Perse, et l’Inde, et puis la Chine, Les mandarins ventrus sous les ombrelles, Et les princesses aux mains fines, Et les lettrés qui se querellent Sur la poésie et sur la beauté; Je voudrais m’attarder au palais enchanté Et comme voyageur étranger Contempler à loisir des paysages peints Sur des étoffes en des cadres de sapin Avec un personnage au milieu d’un verger; Je voudrais voir des assassins souriant Du bourreau qui coupe un cou d’innocent Avec son grand sabre courbé d’Orient, Je voudrais voir des pauvres et des reines; Je voudrais voir des roses et du sang; Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine. Et puis m’en revenir plus tard Narrer mon aventure aux curieux de rêves En élevant comme Sinbad ma vieille tasse arabe De temps en temps jusqu’à mes lèvres Pour interrompre le conte avec art . . . La flûte enchantée L’ombre est douce et mon maître dort Coiffé d’un bonnet comique de soie Et son long nez jaune en sa barbe blanche. Mais moi, je suis éveillée encor Et j’écoute au dehors Une chanson de flûte où s’épanche Tour à tour la tristesse ou la joie. Un air tour à tour langoureux ou frivole Que mon amoureux chéri joue. Et quand je m’approche de la croisée Il me semble que chaque note s’envole De la flûte vers ma joue Comme un mystérieux baiser. L’indifférent Tes yeux sont doux comme ceux d’une fille, Jeune étranger, et la courbe fine De ton beau visage de duvet ombragé Est plus séduisante encor de ligne. Ta lèvre chante sur le pas de ma porte Une lange inconnue et charmante Comme une musique fausse. Entre! Et que mon vin te réconforte . . . Mais non, tu passes Et de mon seuil je te vois t’éloigner Me faisant un dernier geste avec grâce Et la hanche légèrement ployée Par ta démarche féminine et lasse . . . —Tristan Klingsor Asia Asia, Asia, Asia, Ancient, marvelous country of fairy tales, where fantasy sleeps like an empress in her forest filled with mystery. Asia, I would like go away with the ship which is rocking this evening in the port, mysterious and lonely, and which finally spreads its violet sails like an immense bird of night in the golden sky. I would like to go towards the islands of flowers, while listening to the wayward sea sing to an old bewitching rhythm. I would like to see Damascus and the Persian cities with airy minarets rising into the sky. I would like to see beautiful silk turbans above black faces with bright teeth; I would like to see eyes dark with love and pupils shining with joy in faces with skins yellow as oranges; I would like to see velvet clothes and robes with long fringes, I would like to see pipes held between lips all surrounded by white beards; I would like to see harsh merchants with shifty looks, and cadis, and viziers, who with a single movement of their bending fingers, grant life or death according to their wish. I would like to see Persia, and India, and then China, The pot-bellied mandarins beneath the umbrellas, and the princesses with fine hands, and the scholars who quarrel over poetry and beauty; I would like to linger at the enchanted palace and as a foreign traveler contemplate at leisure countrysides painted on fabrics in frames of fir with a figure in the midst of an orchard; I would like to see smiling assassins, the executioner who cuts an innocent neck with his great curved sabre from the Orient. I would like to see beggars and queens; I would like to see roses and blood; I would like to see those who die of love or hate. And then come back later narrate my adventure to those curious of dreams while raising like Sinbad my old Arab cup from time to time to my lips to interrupt the tale with artistry . . . The Enchanted Flute The shadow is soft and my master sleeps wearing a comical bonnet of silk and his long yellow nose in his white beard. But I, I am still awake, and I hear outside a flute song in which pours out sadness or joy in turn. An air sometimes languorous, sometimes frivolous that my dear lover plays. And when I draw near the window, it seems to me that each note flies away from the flute to my cheek like a mysterious kiss. The Indifferent One Your eyes are soft like those of a girl, young stranger, and the fine curve of your beautiful face shadowed with down is still more seductive in its curve. Your lip sings on my doorstep an unknown and charming language like a false music. Enter! And let my wine refresh you . . . But no, you pass, and from my doorstep I see you leaving making a last gesture with grace and your hips gently swaying, with your feminine and languid walk . . . Return to Parlance Program Notes

KARI DOCTER, CELLO Kari Jane Docter, cello, is a native of Minneapolis, MN. She was a student of Eleonore Schoenfeld at the University of Southern California, and graduated magna cum lauda from Rice University, where she studied with Norman Fischer. Upon graduation from Juilliard, as a masters’ student of Joel Krosnick, Kari entered the professional orchestra scene, which took her from the New World Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Utah Symphony, to the Minnesota Orchestra, where she played two seasons. In the fall of 2002, she joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. A lover of chamber music, Kari has been heard at such prestigious music festivals as Marlboro, Tanglewood, and the Grand Teton Music Festival, as well as on the smaller stages of Carnegie Hall with the MET Chamber Ensemble. She can be seen on Wynton Marsalis’ PBS series, “Marsalis on Music” performing with Yo-Yo Ma.