Ian Scarfe to Bring Spanish Music to Century Club

Poster for the event being described, showing the three performers (screenshot from the Groupmuse Web page)

Pianist Ian Scarfe will begin the new year with his next visit to the Century Club of California. Once again, he will be joined by a cellist, this time James Jaffe. The title of next month’s program will be An Afternoon in Spain – Classical Spanish Music and Flamenco. Each of the instrumentalists will begin with a solo selection.

Scarfe will open the program with Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 19, his “Boléro” in A minor. This will be followed by Jaffe’s performance of the three-movement suite for solo cello composed by Gaspar Cassadó in 1926. (Cassadó was taught by Pablo Casals and was probably influenced by his teacher’s performances of the solo cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach.) Scarfe will then accompany mezzo Deborah Rosengaus in a performance of Siete canciones populares españolas, Manuel de Falla’s arrangements for soprano and piano of seven traditional Spanish songs.

The remainder of the program will be devoted to settings of Spanish dances. Scarfe will begin with Isaac Albéniz’s Opus 37, the six Danzas Españolas. This will be followed by the “Ritual Fire Dance,” an episode from the music composed Falla for the ballet El amor brujo (the bewitched love). The program will then conclude with the Spanish Dances collection by Enrique Granados.

For those that do not already know, the Century Club is located at 1355 Franklin Street, between Post Street and Sutter Street. However, all arrangements must be made through a Groupmuse Web page. Ticket prices begin at $25, with $5 to hold a reservation. As of this writing, 43 of 75 spots are still available. The performance will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 25. Doors will open at 1:30 p.m. Drinks will be provided at the intermission (both with and without alcohol). However, the club itself is not wheelchair accessible.

Omni Video Premiere: Duo Evocaciones

Guitarist Pietro Locatto and cellist Martina Biondi (courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

This morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released the latest video to be added to its Omni On Location series. As was the case with the last video in this series, the performance involved the pairing of a guitarist, Pietro Locatto, with another instrumentalist, this time cellist Martina Biondi. This time the video was recorded in Villa Ala, an eighteenth-century villa located in the Italian town of Rivalba. The performance took place earlier this year on February 20.

The performers call themselves Duo Evocaciones. As they put it, their objective is to “‘evoke’ the expressive colors of the main protagonists of the Spanish national school which developed between the 19th and 20th centuries.” Only one of the works on the program was explicitly composed for the cello, “Requiebros” (compliments), by Gaspar Cassadó, written for cello and piano in 1934. (As might be guessed, Cassadó was, himself, a cellist.)

The entire program was framed by arrangements of two instrumental compositions. It began with the “Intermezzo” from the one-act opera “Goyescas,” composed by Enrique Granados; and it concluded with the “Danza ritual del fuego” (ritual fire dance) from the one-act ballet “El amor brujo” (love, the sorcerer), whose music was composed by Manuel de Falla. The remaining works on the program were arrangements of music originally composed for solo piano. The first of these was “Granada,” the opening movement of the first collection that Isaac Albéniz entitled Suite Española. The other two were selected from the collection of twelve Spanish dances compiled by Granados.

Those of my generation are likely to associate at least some of these selections with solo performances by guitarist Andrés Segovia. Others might associate these performances with the recent cello-piano recital presented by LIEDER ALIVE! at the end of last month. Personally, I found myself easily drawn into the cello-guitar arrangements of music that I had previously known from guitarists and/or pianists. Duo Evocaciones has clearly established their own approach to repertoire; and I would have no problem with encountering them a second time, perhaps when they embark on a tour of the United States!

Omni to Premiere Holcomb Video Recital

Alec Holcomb with his guitar (courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

Having covered the latest video shoot for the Live from St. Mark’s concert series a little over a week ago, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts announced yesterday the launch of its next live video program. The performances are streamed through the Omni Foundation YouTube channel; and the home page for those videos includes a SUBSCRIBE hyperlink, which enables notification every time a video is added to the collection. The guitarist to be featured on the new video will be Alec Holcomb.

The program covers music from the early nineteenth century to the present. The earliest work on the program is Mauro Giuliani’s Opus 61, given the title “Grande Overture.” This music for solo guitar was composed in 1809, which (as a “fun fact”) is the year before the birth of Frédéric Chopin. It is therefore a bit interesting that Holcomb turned to Chopin for his second encore selection, the seventh, in the key of A major, of the 24 preludes collected in Opus 28. Holcomb concluded his program with his own arrangement of the first and third movements of Gaspar Cassadó’s three-movement suite for solo cello.

The best-known of the living composers (at least here in the Bay Area) is Sérgio Assad. Holcomb performed his “Imbricatta,” which the composer describes as structured in ten asymmetrical layers. The other living composers on the program are Reinhold Westerheide (“Mistral”) and Daniel De Togni (“Sing Me into Singing”). The other encore selection is “The Claw” by the twentieth-century composer Jerry Reed, who died in 2008.

The video will become available for viewing at noon on Sunday, October 9. The YouTube Web page has already been created with a “countdown display” in the lower left hand corner. That window has a “Notify me” hyperlink. The video was recorded this past August 26; and, like the recording of Marko Topchii made this past September 27, the performance took place in front of a live audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Video production was by Matthew Washburn, and the audio was mastered by Sienna Digital.

Omni to Sell Tickets for Video Taping Session

Alec Holcomb with his guitar (courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

On the last Friday of this month, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will host a video taping session to record a solo guitar recital performed by Alec Holcomb. Classical Guitar Magazine has described Holcomb as a “burgeoning star in the guitar world;" and that assessment will be reinforced by the rich repertoire that he has prepared for his video. The nineteenth century will be represented by Mauro Giuliani’s Opus 61, given the title “Grande Ouverture.” The twentieth will involve the first and third movements from a suite for solo cello by Gaspar Cassadó, with Holcomb providing his own arrangement of the score.

Among the living composers, the best known will probably be Sérgio Assad. The full title of his contribution to the program will be “Imbricatta in 10 asymmetrical layers.” Assad composed this piece for Marc Teicholz. The other composers to be represented on the program will be Daniel De Togni (“Sing Me into Singing”) and Reinhold Westerheide (“Mistral”).

This will be the latest Live from St. Mark’s event to be presented by Omni. An audience is invited to attend this recording session, which will take place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Friday, August 26. Tickets are being sold in advance but only over the phone. The number to call is 415-242-4500, and all tickets are being sold for $30. There will also be tickets sold at the door between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on the evening of the performance. The church is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the intersection with Franklin Street.

Hakhnazaryan Makes an Impressive SF Debut

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the San Francisco debut of the young Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan. This was the second of the three concerts in the 2017–2018 Young Masters Series, the annual reminder that awareness of the coming generation is always just as important as the enjoyment of those who have firmly established their careers. Hakhnazaryan was accompanied by pianist Noreen Polera, returning to SFP for the third time.

The program was divided between large-scale compositions and a diversity of shorter works. The major work on the program was Johannes Brahms’ Opus 99 cello sonata in F major, the second of the two he composed. Brahms completed his first cello sonata, Opus 38 in E minor, in 1865, around the time he was beginning work on A German Requiem (Opus 45), which became his first major public success. Indeed, he had trouble getting Opus 38 published and even spoke dismissively about it.

Opus 99 was written about two decades later. It presents a composer with a far more positive attitude, confident to write a duo in which the partners are very much on equal terms. The result is a first-rate match of richly expressive phrases for the cello that resound through floods of pianistic gestures that never force the cello off the stage. Both Hakhnazaryan and Polera clearly understood this relationship, supremely confident that they were up to its high-wire challenges. The result could not have been more satisfying, making it clear that the judges for the fourteenth International Tchaikovsky competition knew what they were doing in awarding the Cello First Prize and Gold Medal to Hakhnazaryan in 2011.

The Brahms sonata was preceded by the work of one of Brahms’ strongest influences, Robert Schumann. His Opus 70 was a coupling of Adagio and Allegro movements originally written for horn and piano. Schumann subsequently specified that the solo part could be taken by cello or violin; but one can easily detect the “horn call” passages in the Allegro movement. Hakhnazaryan took the idioms that characterized both of the movements at face value, never trying to imitate a horn but reflecting that instrument’s capacity for not only vigorous energy but also extended lyrical passage by rethinking those qualities through his cello.

The intermission was followed by a diverse assortment of music on a shorter durational scale. Hakhnazaryan began with a collection of five relatively brief pieces, each based on a folk theme, by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze. Hakhnazaryan observed that there were many parallels in the folk traditions of Georgia and Armenia. Indeed, listening to these engaging miniatures, one could easily hear echoes of Aram Khachaturian (along with a bit of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s take on an “Arab” dance, which he composed for the ballet The Nutcracker). There were even a few suggestions of klezmer, making me think that the ethnomusicological expertise of Veretski Pass might have been informative.

The geographical stance then migrated west to the Iberian peninsula. “Asturias,” which was originally published as the first movement of Isaac Albéniz’ Opus 232 suite Chants d’Espagne, is one of that composer’s best known pieces. It is also one of the most successful evocations of guitar technique to come from a piano keyboard, so it should be no surprise that the music is now played frequently by guitarists. So last night we had a cello and piano evoking the spirit of a piano evoking the spirit of a guitar, prepared by an arranger not credited in the program book. To his credit Hakhnazaryan seems to have a clear sense of when the music was conducive to the cello, and he played up those moments for all they were worth.

from IMSLP (public domain)

He then complemented this “chain of evocations” with an evocation of Albéniz himself by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin. Shchedrin was no stranger to Spanish rhetoric, having transmogrified Georges Bizet’s score for Carmen into a bizarre concoction for strings and percussion, which served as music for a ballet based on the opera choreographed by Alberto Alonzo for Shchedrin’s wife, prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya. Shchedrin’s “Imitating Albeniz” was written for solo piano in 1959 and subsequently arranged for cello and piano by Walter Despalj. Hakhnazaryan and Polera presented this version with all of the wit it merited.

Hakhnazaryan then turned to the “violin encore” repertoire with his own arrangement of the “Meditation” interlude from Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs. Listening to his performance, one could easily forget that Massenet had intended the music for a solo violin. Hakhnazaryan then returned to Iberia, concluding his program with “Requiebros” (compliments) by the Catalonian composer (and student of Pablo Casals) Gaspar Cassadó, a thoroughly engaging wrap-up of his survey of miniaturist techniques.

As might be expected, however, he and Polera returned with two encores. The first went back to appropriating virtuoso violin music. This time he turned to the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini playing his “a Preghiera” sonata, an introduction and variations on “Dal tuo stellato soglio” from Gioachino Rossini’s opera Mosè in Egitto. What made this a particularly virtuoso turn was that Paganini required the entire piece to be played on the highest string of the instrument (E on the violin but a fifth lower on the cello). He then concluded with the one selection by an Armenian composer, a nocturne by Edward Bagdasarian (not to be confused with Ross Bagdasarian or any of his chipmunks). Again this was music written for violin which translated over to cello with little difficulty.

Cellist Hakhnazaryan is Next SFP “Young Master”

Cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Next month will see the second concert in the annual Young Masters Series organized by San Francisco Performances (SFP). The program will present the San Francisco debut of Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan. His accompanist will be pianist Noreen Polera, who will be appearing under SFP auspices for the third time. (At her first appearance she accompanied cellist Clancy Newman.)

Hakhnazaryan moved to the United States at the age of 22 to begin his studies at the New England Conservatory. This was in 2011, the year in which he won Cello First Prize and Gold Medal at the fourteenth International Tchaikovsky competition. Prior to making the move, he had been mentored by Mstislav Rostropovich. Since then he has accumulated an impressive track record of performances as a concerto soloist, a recitalist, and member of a chamber ensemble.

Hakhnazaryan’s program for SFP will consist of original compositions and arrangements. Nineteenth-century romanticism will be represented by both Robert Schumann’s Opus 70 coupling of Adagio and Allegro movements and Johannes Brahms’ Opus 99 (second) sonata in F major. He will play an arrangement (probably the one by Jules Delsart) of the “Meditation” music from the second act of Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs. He will also play an arrangement of the opening prelude (also known as both “Asturias” and “Leyenda”) from Isaac Albéniz’ Opus 232 suite Cantos de España (songs of Spain). This will be coupled with Rodion Shchedrin’s “In the Style of Albeniz,” which he originally composed for violin and piano in 1973. Also from the twentieth century will be Gaspar Cassadó’s Requiebros” (complements), which was dedicated to Pablo Casals.

Those who have been following the Young Masters Series may recall that, when cellist David Requiro gave his performance in this series in March of 2014, he concluded with a fascinating encore selection. This was “Sachidao,” the third of the set Five Pieces on Folk Themes by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze. Hakhnazaryan’s recital will include all five pieces in this set as the most recent selection on his program.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 16. The venue will be the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, located at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. All tickets are being sold for $40. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

The SFP 2017–2018 Young Masters Series

Those who have been reading my articles for some time probably already know why Henry Miller had a profound effect on the state of mind I bring to every new season. For those who think the connection is an odd one, it has to do with a profile he wrote about the composer Edgard Varèse, which I first encountered in Miller’s essay collection The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The entire volume is based on profiles of those with highly creative talents in different areas, all of whom found themselves sidelined by “mainstream” thinking. The punch line in the Varèse piece is thus not so much about Varèse himself as it is directed to those ignoring him:

No one asks you to throw Mozart out the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Laotse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

Every season I look forward to the Young Masters Series organized by San Francisco Performances (SFP) because it provides a platform for those “scratching on the window-panes.” Those of us living in San Francisco are fortunate in having institutions such as SFP, the San Francisco Symphony, and the San Francisco Opera upon which we can count for opportunities to enjoy “the best of the best” through performance, rather than through any of those popular media of reproduction. However, the Young Masters Series cultivates our awareness of what the coming generation is doing.

Traditionally, the Young Masters Series has focused on chamber music offerings. However, in the 2017–2018 season, the first of the three concerts in this series will be devoted to jazz. This constitutes at least some compensation for the fact that this season will not include a Jazz Series, as past seasons have done.

As in the past, all three of the Young Masters concerts will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. All of the performances will take place on a Friday evening. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

December 15: The Series will begin with Cuban jazz pianist Alfredo Rodriguez, whose formal training in the classical genre is as solid as are his skills at playing jazz. Born in Havana in 1985, he left Cuba for Los Angeles in 2009, where he was fortunate enough to have Quincy Jones as a mentor. He signed with the Detroit-based jazz label Mack Avenue Records in 2011 and can already claim the distinction of a GRAMMY nomination. Details about the program he has prepared for SFP have not yet been announced.

February 16: Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan also claims a distinguished mentor, Mstislav Rostropovich. He made his move to the United States in conjunction with beginning his studies at the New England Conservatory. 2011 was also a landmark year for him, because it was when he won Cello First Prize and Gold Medal at the fourteenth International Tchaikovsky competition. He was 22 at the time.

His program will consist of original compositions and arrangements. Nineteenth-century romanticism will be represented by both Robert Schumann’s Opus 70 coupling of Adagio and Allegro movements and Johannes Brahms’ Opus 99 (second) sonata in F major. He will play an arrangement (probably the one by Jules Delsart) of the “Meditation” music from the second act of Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs. He will also play an arrangement of the opening prelude (also known as both “Asturias” and “Leyenda”) from Isaac Albéniz’ Opus 232 suite Cantos de España (songs of Spain). This will be coupled with Rodion Shchedrin’s “In the Style of Albeniz,” which he originally composed for violin and piano in 1973. Also from the twentieth century will be Gaspar Cassadó’s Requiebros” (complements), which was dedicated to Pablo Casals.

Those who have been following the Young Masters Series may recall that, when cellist David Requiro gave his performance in this series in March of 2014, he concluded with a fascinating encore selection. This was “Sachidao,” the third of the set Five Pieces on Folk Themes by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze. Hakhnazaryan’s recital will include all five pieces in this set as the most recent selection on his program.

March 16: The final recitalist will be violinist Simone Porter. Last season the nineteenth-year-old Porter performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. She is currently studying with Robert Lipsett at the Colburn Conservatory of music in Los Angeles. Details of her program have not yet been announced, but her most recent offering will be by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her program will also include more traditional works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ernest Chausson, and Leoš Janáček.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $105 for all seating in the SFCM Concert Hall. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on July 31.

Cellist Jennifer Kloetzel Leads Off the 2016 Fall San Francisco Performances Salons

Yesterday evening at the Hotel Rex, San Francisco Performances presented the first of its four Salon programs for the fall season. The featured artist was cellist Jennifer Kloetzel, best known to many (most?) in the audience as the founding cellist of the Cypress String Quartet, which disbanded after twenty years of concertizing this past June. Her accompanist was pianist Robert Koenig, who is now her faculty colleague at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she teaches two days out of the week while remaining a resident of San Francisco. She presented a program that sampled two major cello sonatas in two markedly different styles, both introduced and followed by shorter and lighter compositions.

The first sonata was the second of the two Opus 5 sonatas for piano and cello that Ludwig van Beethoven composed during a visit to Berlin in 1796. By way of context, 1796 was the year in which Ataria published the three Opus 2 piano sonatas that Beethoven had dedicated to his former teacher Joseph Haydn. He was just beginning to establish his reputation and was learning a thing or two about promotion. While in Berlin he was introduced to the King of Prussia Frederick William II, whose love of music was closely tied to his own mastery of the cello. The King’s court was frequented by the Duport brothers, both of whom were cellists. Jean-Pierre was one of the King’s teachers; and both he and his brother Jean-Louis played frequently at court. For those who read about the Dover Quartet recording yesterday, this is the same king that paid little attention to the three string quartets sent to him by a cash-desperate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart near the end of this life.

Beethoven’s encounter with the King’s court was more successful, and it led to his honoring the monarch with original compositions. He had both of his Opus 5 sonatas performed for the King, taking the piano part and playing with one of the Duport brothers. (There is no conclusive evidence as to which Duport played with Beethoven. The Wikipedia page for these sonatas currently favors Jean-Louis.) This provided the composer with ample opportunity to show off his keyboard virtuosity while also providing a platform for the King’s favorite instrument played by one of his favored performers.

In many ways the Opus 5 sonatas owe as much of a debt to Haydn as the Opus 2 piano sonatas do. By 1796 both Mozart (now deceased) and Haydn (still going) had shared an interest in providing an opening Allegro movement of a symphony with an Adagio introduction, perhaps as a reflection back on either the “French overture” structure or the four-movement sonata da chiesa structure of the Baroque period. By the time Haydn wrote his final (“London”) symphony (Hoboken I/104) in 1795, the Adagio had extended to sixteen measures that took on several critical mood shifts. Still in his twenties, Beethoven continued to maintain a strong streak of showing that he could better Haydn at some of the master’s best games; and, as a result, the Adagio sostenuto e espressivo introduction to the G minor sonata performed last night ran to 43 measures with as much thematic diversity as could be found in a “real” Adagio movement and a few false endings thrown in to build up a bit of suspense. Some might even choose to call this a movement unto itself, but it is clear from the way it ends that it was intended as an introduction to the Allegro molto più tosto presto that follows. (For the record, the first movement of the second Opus 5 sonata is the longest movement found in any of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas.)

Beethoven was clearly trying to impress the King with music whose attention to dramatic qualities was as strong as its commitment to virtuosity. Yesterday evening’s performance could not have scored better on both counts. This proved to establish the full power of the chemistry between Kloetzel and Koenig, both of whom had a generous amount of weight to carry (and this movement was the only part of the two-movement sonata that they performed). Curiously, they chose to couple this ambitious undertaking with an equally ambitious result of another composer writing in his late twenties but from an entirely different era. The composer was Sergei Rachmaninoff; and his Opus 19 G minor cello sonata (the same key as the second Opus 5 Beethoven sonata) was composed in 1901, the same year in which he wrote what is probably his best-known piece, his Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in C minor.

While Kloetzel and Koenig presented the opening of the Beethoven sonata, they played the final two movements (Andante and Allegro molto) of the Rachmaninoff. The Andante is particularly engaging with his rich texture of polyrhythmic superpositions and a melodic line for the cello that weaves its way within the dense counterpoint on the piano. By way of contrast the final movement settles into a more conventional structure in which both cello and piano have ample opportunity to soar through a diversity of highly melodic themes. As was recently observed on this site, Rachmaninoff made it a point to treat cello and piano as equal partners in this sonata. Those who know this sonata could appreciate just how effective this combination was in last night’s performance. Hopefully, those just getting to know the piece came away with a craving to listen to the other two movements.

The opening selection came from Gaspar Cassadó’s Collection de six morceaux classiques (collection of six classical pieces), which Universal Edition published in 1925. Cassadó attributed each of these pieces to a “classical” composer; and Kloetzel selected the “Toccata” attributed to Girolamo Frescobaldi. The other composers in the collection were Franz Schubert, Luigi Boccherini, François Couperin, Gottlieb Muffat, and Martin Berteau, the last known for his études for solo cello. Cassadó added a piano accompaniment for one of those études, but the only other composer whose actually music is included in this collection is Muffat. Thus, the toccata movement is entirely original Cassadó; but, questions of authenticity aside, the music provided a first-rate way to light a fire to stimulate listening to the sonata movements that would follow.

The concluding selection was one of three rhapsodies that Alberto Ginastera composed to evoke the pampas of Argentina. Each was given the name “Pampeana;” and the second was scored for cello and piano. In the manner of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, the music spans a variety of different moods, each of which captures a different aspect of these wide-open plains. However, Ginastera is best known for his intricate rhythmic patterns; and these made for an impressive display in the final section. During the following Q&A both Kloetzel and Koenig gave their own thoughts about the intense concentration required to negotiate that complexity; but the music certainly made for the perfect razzle-dazzle conclusion to an impressively diverse program.

In Praise of Naumburg

I may have found a data point that runs contrary to my generally dismal view of music competitions and judges whose interests seem to conflict with what I have called "accountability to the music itself." The source of the data is the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation; and, because San Francisco Performances has an association with the Naumburg Foundation through which they present a recital by each year's Naumburg Competition winner, I have now been able to enjoy two thoroughly "music-based" performances. The first was in 2005 by soprano Sari Gruber; and the second was last night, when I heard 23-year-old cellist David Requiro at Herbst Theatre. I probably should not be surprised that I seem to enjoy Naumburg winners better than those who have won other prizes. Last night I learned that Robert Mann is the current Director of the Naumburg Foundation, the same Robert Mann whom I was extolling on Saturday for his communicative skills in a pedagogical setting. Most important among those skills is his ability to communicate about music, rather than just technique, assuming that technique can only be mastered once one understands the music to which it is being applied.

Requiro is a model example of an up-and-coming musician who appreciates the value of such understanding of the music he plays. Thus, while I often try to look for a unifying theme in a concert program, the primary asset of Requiro's selections was the breadth of repertoire over which he is willing to apply his understanding skills. On the historical time scale the program ranged from Ludwig can Beethoven in the past to William Bolcom in the present, with "stops along the way" for Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, and Gaspar Cassadó. This scope also demonstrated an ability to work with a variety of time scales, from the relatively brief and distinct Beethoven WoO 46 variations (on the "Bei Männern" duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte) and the comparatively short movements of Bolcom's capriccio through the "unified" three movements of the Debussy sonata to the symphonic-scale Brahms F major (Opus 99) sonata. In other words each of the works on the program required its own characteristic approach to execution. Not only did Requiro find that approach in each case; but also his rapport with his accompanist, Elizabeth DeMio, was so thorough that the results always constituted a well-conceived and shared vision.

I also appreciated that the program honored both "abstract" and "representational" approaches to composition. Thus, the symphonic plan of the Brahms sonata was nicely balanced by not only the explicit depictions of Cassadó and Bolcom but also the possibly "hidden program" of the Debussy sonata. (The program notes by Eric Bromberger neglected to mention that Debussy had considered titling this sonata "Pierrot fâché avec la lune" [Pierrot annoyed with the moon]. One has to wonder if this choice of title had anything to do with a reaction of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which had been composed about three years earlier. Debussy fâché avec Schoenberg?) Consequently, the wide diversity of performance challenges also made for an equally wide diversity of listening experiences. One could not ask for more of any concert program.