The final concert in this season’s “A Musical Feast” series is sure to delight all Francophile music lovers, since it features the music of Impressionist and post-Impressionist French composers, served-up with a fresh dollop of Israeli flavored tango music.
Violin virtuoso Charles Castleman, Professor at Frost School of Music, University of Miami is always a welcome guest on the series, returns to perform a pair of showpieces with Buffalo’s own favorite pianist, Claudia Hoca, who has been able to successfully return to top form after an almost fatal car accident a couple of years ago. The pair will be featured in the Poème, Op. 25, an exquisitely lyrical work by Ernest Chausson, who died all too young in a freak bicycle accident at the age of 44. Castleman and Hoca will also perform the rarely programmed Sonata for violin and piano No.2 in g major, composed in 1927-1929 by Maurice Ravel, one of the very first works by any European classical composer to make effective use of jazz, that uniquely American musical language which swept through post World War I Europe.
Claudia Hoca will also partner UB professor of cello Jonathan Golove, they will perform a pair of works by the French sisters, Lili and Nadia Boulanger. Lili, who suffered from chronic illness from an early age, composed her Nocturne for piano and cello in 1911 at the age of 18, a few short years before her sadly premature death at the age of 24. Her older, long-lived sister Nadia, who composed her Trois pieces for cello and piano in 1914, was a French composer, conductor, and pedagogue who died in 1979. Nadia counted among her students many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Astor Piazzolla. In the early sixties, Charles Haupt, founder and artistic director of "A Musical Feast", was awarded a two year Fulbright scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Jonathan Golove will join the Israeli-born composer, and multi-instrument performer Moshe Shulman, a Buffalo resident who has been instrumental in establishing the local tango scene, in his new work Praxis, composed for cello and bandoneón, a type of concertina that is essential in the performance of tango music.
Tickets: $20/$10 students/Burchfield Penney members. Call 716-878-6011 for pre-sale.