Where Words End
Recipients of the Avery Fisher Career Grant and many other international prizes, pianist Evren Ozel and violinist Joshua Brown perform a program exploring the writer Marcel Proust’s assertion that music alone can access what language leaves unsaid. The works on the program bear a direct literary imprint: Chausson's Poème translates a short story by Turgenev into musical form, while Schumann's Kreisleriana depicts E.T.A. Hoffmann's fictional musician Johannes Kreisler. Debussy’s Preludes for piano include literature references from Baudelaire to Shakespeare and more. The movements from the F.A.E. Sonata and Ysaÿe's Ballade, meanwhile, were inspired by their composers’ close friendships with poets and literary figures of their time. Finally, perhaps the most remarkable connection on this program belongs to Fauré's Violin Sonata and Proust. Through his In Search of Lost Time, Proust immortalizes Fauré as the fictional composer Vinteuil, whose violin sonata becomes a recurring symbol of longing and lost love. That a real piece of music could be so thoroughly absorbed into one of literature's greatest novels speaks to exactly the kind of alchemy this program sets out to explore.
BRAHMS – Scherzo in C minor, WoO 2 (from FAE Sonata)
YSAŸE – Sonata Op. 27, No. 3 “Ballade”
DEBUSSY – Preludes, Books 1 and 2
Ondine
La danse de Puck
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir
CHAUSSON – Poème, Op. 25
SCHUMANN – Kreisleriana, Op. 16
II. Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch
Intermezzo, WoO 22 (from FAE Sonata)
FAURÉ – Sonata No. 1 in A Major, Op. 13
Allegro molto
Andante
Allegro vivo Allegro assai quasi presto