October 18 & 19, 2026

october concert

Franz Schubert
String Quartet No. 8 in B-flat, D112

Vítězslava Kaprálová
Elegy

David Cerutti
Amor Por El Presente

Frances White
The Book of Roses and Memory

Joaquin Turina
Scène Andalouse, Op. 7

Sunday, October 18, 3 pm * Round Hill Community Church * 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, CT
Monday, October 19, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob

Program Notes

In his book Subsequent Performances, Jonathan Miller observes that forgeries of art works made in the same artistic epoch as the original are difficult to detect, while forgeries from a later era are easy to spot. Not because the forger was unskillful, but because the forger of a later era, steeped in the education and assumptions of their time, unconsciously sees and emphasizes different traits of the original. (See Blink pp.1-8 by Malcolm Gladwell which tells how art professionals sussed out a fake kouros statue.) This can manifest in interesting ways when something straddles eras (think of how EVs are charged using plugs that look like gas pumps).

Franz Schubert’s (1797–1828) music straddled the Classical and Romantic eras. Born in Vienna when Beethoven and Haydn were at the height of their powers, and dying after Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Paganini had composed some of their finest works, Schubert lived a musical life centered around family, friends, and fellow artists (the informal musical gatherings called Schubertiades were legendary), and only achieved international fame posthumously. As a young composer, he used the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as templates, but his intuitive musical and technical choices in his early works followed a different aesthetic from his models. Those models explored ways of progressing from contrast and conflict to resolution and closure. Schubert, whose best early works were his lieder, instead instinctively chose to underscore the lyric while exploring harmonic innovations. The result: music essentially different (albeit wonderful) from the originals that Schubert intended to copy.

For example, take String Quartet No. 8, D.112, written in nine (!) days in 1814 when the 17-year-old Schubert worked as a teacher in his father’s school.  Its four movements are a cornucopia of melodic and harmonic inspiration, often with the same phrase alternating between light and shade (or major and minor [listen until 4:55] if you care about such things). This changes the music’s focus in ways that differ from its models. For example, the music of the first movement unwinds its momentum (listen until 5:33) at structural moments where its templates increase it.  The slow second movement ambles along exploring different harmonies, making it the quartet’s longest movement and the fulcrum of the entire piece. The third movement—a country dance with a mysterious trio—and the vigorous fourth movement—with the scampering first violin playing catch me if you can (listen until 0:33) with the other players—also explore light and shade in a way that transforms the structure of its antecedents. Transformation or not, Schubert wrote a work that succeeds on its own terms.

Hollywood has a thing for depicting composers, such as Schubert, Mozart, Gershwin or Chopin, dying while in their 30s, preferably impoverished (like characters in Puccini‘s La Bohème). But Hollywood has not yet exploited the history of composers who died very young—Arriaga (19), Lili Boulanger (24), Pergolesi (26), and Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915–1940).

Born in Brno, then part of Austria-Hungary, Kaprálová started composing at age 9 and enrolled in the Brno Conservatory at 15, the Prague Conservatory at 20 and the École Normale de Musique in Paris at 22, studying composition and conducting. Kaprálová’s career blossomed while she was living in Paris between WWI and WWII. Her music was published and performed, and she conducted ensembles such as the Czech Philharmonic and the BBC Orchestra. So why is Kaprálová’s body of fifty works unknown?

The obscurity is not (for once) because of sexism. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, she lost her government stipend and was unable to receive money from family. Kaprálová tried to make the best of it, doing what she could to make a living while supporting the Parisian Czech expat community. She became ill just before evacuating Paris in May 1940 in anticipation of the Nazi occupation and died two months later in Montpellier of either typhoid fever or tuberculosis. Her life and her work, like so much else of its time, were mostly forgotten.

But today Kaprálová’s music is experiencing a revival, and we can now appreciate how she combined her melodic gifts, with roots in her Czech heritage, with the techniques and innovations of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and her teacher, mentor and lover, Bohuslav Martinů. An excellent example of that amalgam is the Elegy for violin and piano, written in 1939 in memory of the Czech author and national hero Karel Čapek, who died on Christmas Day 1938.  It combines folk music tinged themes taken from her String Quartet Op. 8 (1936) with the evocative harmonic palette she experienced in Paris—a fitting tribute to a champion of Czech language and culture.

Have you ever heard an ophicleide? Perhaps a baryton? A serpent, an arpeggione, or a chalumeau? These are just a few of the instruments waiting for a revival along the lines of the recorder, the harpsichord, and the lute. New York violist David Cerutti (b. 1960), who performs with the Metropolitan Opera, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its chamber ensemble, and the American Classical Orchestra, is a leading advocate for the viola d’amore.

The viola d’amore, a hybrid of the viol and the violin families, has a flat back plate, 6 or 7 strings that are bowed, and a corresponding number of unbowed resonating strings that provide a “halo” of sound that lingers after a note is played. While its heyday was during the Baroque era (Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann were just a few composers who employed the viola d’amore), composers such as Janáček, Meyerbeer, Massenet, Puccini, and Hindemith also composed for it.

A viola d’amore hanging on a wall of a luthier’s shop in San Francisco piqued the teenaged Cerutti’s interest, but it wasn’t until he was performing with period ensembles in New York that the opportunity to take up the viola d’amore arose. Since then, Cerutti has played the viola d’amore throughout the world. But he has done more than play the instrument; he has composed for it.

Cerutti wrote Amor Por El Presente (Love for the Present) for viola d’amore and narrator in 2003 for a concert benefiting music education in the Dominican Republic. The text, by Dominican born and New York based community activist and psychoanalyst Jorge Piña, is an example of Metapoesy—poetry that “examine(s) the very medium of poetry itself,” and that has “…images, symbols and imaginary elements (e.g. ‘your distant clock, vain and intensely sullen’) to express ideas and poetic concepts.” The “hyper-sensitive, hallucinogenic intensity” of the text (suggesting connections to the work of Freud, Lacan, Jung, and Derrida) is matched by Cerutti’s use of extended techniques. For example, Cerutti alters the standard tuning of the viola d’amore, and the resulting tightly bound augmented chords (ask the performers what this means) allow him to achieve effects such as the opening dramatic gesture on open strings that serve as “’lightning strikes’ (listen until 25:43) intended to almost shock the listener into taking in the surreal vision of the poem.” Cerutti’s dramatic interweaving of music and text achieves a rare and memorable “profound sense of surrealism and dissociative depth.”

Many composers have written music to exploit the sounds of new instruments. Tchaikovsky’s race to use the celesta in The Nutcracker before Rimsky-Korsakov discovered it, Mozart falling in love with the sound of the clarinet, and jazz taking up the saxophone are just a few examples.

In the 20th Century, the development of electronic instruments, later abetted by computers, presented musicians with new possibilities. But the new possibilities led to new questions. One of the most vexing has been how to blend acoustic and amplified music (consider the uproar when Bob Dylan used an electric guitar for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965).

Frances White (b. 1960), educated at University of Maryland, Brooklyn College, and Princeton University, has come up with her own answers. After she took her first class in electronic music, she “fell in love with the way one could shape sound, timbre, by hand. The ability to design the spectrum of a sound…was beyond thrilling for me…. It allowed me to take this almost painterly approach to sound, shaping timbre as a painter might shape a color.” Her twofold solution to combining acoustic and synthetic sound has been to incorporate natural and ambient sounds in the computer-generated electronic music and to “think of the electronic part as a kind of sonic space, within which the performers find their place.”

Her The book of roses and memory, the second work of a trilogy, for viola, electronic sound, and narrator, was written in 2008 and was premiered by today’s performer Liuh-Wen Ting.  It uses texts by White’s husband James Pritchett which were inspired by Francis Parkman's The Book of Roses. Featuring the names of old roses, it is a “reflection” on the trilogy’s first work, The Old Rose Reader (2004) for violin, electronic sound, and video. In The book of roses and memory, a husband reads to his convalescing wife and “it is as if the viola of the second piece is somehow remembering the violin of the first. The sense of the violin, irretrievably lost, haunts The book of roses and memory. Meanwhile, the narrator tells new stories that themselves reflect themes of memory and loss, while the violist alternately mourns for what is lost and contemplates what is discovered.” To White, both pieces are “quite shamelessly romantic, in fact—which to me seemed necessary, since these pieces are, after all, about roses, the most romantic of flowers!”

There is a well-worn literary trope of valuing your roots only after leaving, and then returning, home. Think of the prodigal son, Bilbo Baggins and, of course “Tap your heels together three times and think to yourself ‘There's no place like home.’”

This happens a lot with composers. Scandinavians such as Grieg and Sibelius spent time in Germany before returning home to use the music of their native land. Americans such as Copland, Glass, Thomson, Quincy Jones, Harris, Piston, and Gottschalk (I’m just getting started) hung around Europe using Paris as a base, coming back to America to create a distinctly American musical vocabulary. And then there were the Spanish composers.

While Spain has always had a vibrant musical culture, many of the best-known Spanish inflected concert works—Carmen, Symphonie Espagnole, Iberia, Bolero, Rapsodie Espagnole—were written by Frenchmen. Indeed, Manuel de Falla claimed that Chabrier captured the spirit of the jota in his tone poem España better than any Spanish composer! But at the beginning of the 20th Century, members of a coterie of Spanish composers, such as Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz, went to France to return the favor.

Seville native Joaquín Turina (1882–1949) was another. Educated in Seville and Madrid, he moved to Paris in 1905 at age 22 to study with Vincent D’Indy, a student of César Franck. In 1907, Turina’s Piano Quintet Op. 1, deeply influenced by his teacher’s music, premiered in Paris with Albéniz and de Falla in attendance. After the concert, Albéniz took Turina and de Falla to a café where he and de Falla exhorted Turina to look to his roots for musical inspiration. Turina took the advice to heart, eventually returning to Spain and later saying "My music is the expression of a native Seville resident who didn't know it until he left it ... Maybe it really takes an artist a little distance to get to know their country, just as an artist takes a few steps back to be able to capture the whole picture."

The Scène Andalouse, Op. 7, composed in 1912, was one of Turina’s first compositions to reflect that change of heart. The music, written for the unusual combination of solo viola, piano, and string quartet (a choice that may have been influenced by the Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 21, by Ernest Chausson, a student of Franck’s), is also programmatic (a rarity in chamber music). The first of its two movements, Crépuscule Du Soir (At Twilight)—yes, Turina was still using French—opens with music featuring the piano before leading into a Serenata, featuring the viola. The Serenata bursts with Spanish influences: habaneras (listen until 4:29), viola gestures suggesting the guitar (listen until 3:06), and melodic figures derived from folk music (listen until 3:24). The second movement, À la Fenêtre (At the Window), has the solo viola and piano interweaving in constant conversation, using ideas from the first movement (a favorite technique of D’Indy and Franck), perhaps suggesting Spanish lovers leaning at a window while having a tête-à-tête at twilight.

© 2026 Ubaldo Valli