Music is life—it expresses all we experience and feel with more meaning and dimensions than we could ever express in words.  This sublime art needs no translator: It touches the soul of all  in a language that is universal.  As Heine said, “Where words end music begins.”

 

Since music is vital testament to our human experience, I designed this program as a journey through the phases of life.  I believe that each of us has our birthright—our ancestral cradle in the Divine…and so our musical itinerary will begin in heaven, travel to our earthly domain where we will live for most of the program—plunge to the fiery depths of hell and finally come full circle to our stellar starting point of heaven.

 

Bach’s love of God and the voice of truth, beauty and joy resonates through the majesty of the first piece on the program:the chorale prelude Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (Awake Ye Faint of Heart- Your Saviour Has Come”).  We hear the awesomeness of God’s processional walk as He enters into our world—the towering glory of his Sprit envelops the earth with musical rays of Hope bringing His heavenly grace into our domain.

 

In Beethoven’s epic sonata Les Adieux (The Farewell)  we are met with the reality of our human condition.  Here the questions are asked “where are my loved ones, where has the familiarity of my old life vanished?  Written during the Napoleanic invasion of 1809, Beethoven wrote this sonata in the shelter of a basement in Vienna, covering his ears with pillows to buffer the thunderous boom of cannonball fire, trying in vain to salvage what was left of his already shattered hearing. A life splintered, fragmented and burdened with turbulence, he is nostalgic for a loved one.  The first two or the three movements of this sonata The Farewell and  The Absence go through the phases of his maelstrom while the third movement The Return heralds the eventual ecstatic release from this state of suspension.

 

A world of legend and folklore envelops us as we approach  Chopin’s Fourth Ballade.  Woven from the cloth of a literary epic by Poland’s poetic hero Adam Mickiewicz we hear the plot unfolding in tone of three brothers on an amazing mission—the perils of their plight find their dramatic resonance in a musical setting that is spun with a continuous golden thread which grafts each contrasting segment of their journey.  The piece unfolds like a rose with a myriad of petals—each one singular and unique yet all belonging to one perfect, organic whole.

 

The mysterious, passionate soul of the Spanish culture finds collective expression in the composer Albeniz.  The music offers us a mosaic through which we can hear various, ever-changing moods and pictures—from the frivolous, coquettish play in the Serenada to the rhythmic, stomping pulse of the Sevilla, leaving us with a musical postcard which is distinctively nationalistic and stamped with vital energy.

 

Conflict, undulating emotions, instability—the tortuous vulnerability of true love; These are the  emotions that Liszt dives into in his Sonetto del Petrarcha Nr. 104.

 

“I fear, I hope, I burn, I freeze again;
Mount to the skies, then bow to earth my face;
Grasp the whole world, yet nothing can obtain

…Death I despise and life alike I hate:
Such, lady, does thou make my wayward state!”

Petrarch

 

Liszt, the master of communicating the deepest emotions of every level- personal, earthly and spiritual—takes these words from the pen of Petrarch and magnifies the tension through sound—in the alchemy of the harmonies…in the heartbreak of its lyrical beauty.

 

Now comes the conclusion of our journey…As promised we will end the same way we began—in Heaven—but not without a fight…

The Dante Sonata is a battleground,a stage on which the proverbial war of good vs. evil takes place.  Based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy” the listener is plunged into a hellish Inferno—where horror and hopelessness abide.

 

As the struggle for redemption ensues, we hear the serene perfection of God expressed in a majestic chorale which rings like a hopeful ray of light through the melee. There is hope and a glimpse of heaven from afar, but defeated we are released back into the depths of the burning umbers of despair.

 

As in life, it is in Music where our corporal hearts and immortal spirit find their solace in reuniting with the Creator.  As the Dante Sonata closes, triumphant and redeemed our human fate is restored.