PROGRAM
American Suite
Piano- Russell Steinberg

Wall Cycle—World Premiere
poetry of Lia Purpura
Soprano- Jessica Schneiderman
Oboe- Kathryn Pisaro
Violins- Niv Ashkenazi, Alisa Luera
Viola- Ivaan Richards
Cello- Stephen Green
Bass- Stephen Pfeifer

Mulholland Fantasies
Piano- Yevgheniy Milyavskiy
Violin- Limor Toren Immerman
Viola- Nick Yee
Cello- Garik Terzian

Haftorah I and II
Piano- Yevgheniy Milyavskiy

This is the first concert of my music that I have produced since the Covid pandemic. It includes two large chamber works and several premieres. The featured work is my new song cycle for soprano, oboe, and strings based on 7 short stunning poems by Lia Purpura titled Wall Cycle. The poetry is almost like haiku. It begins enigmatically just talking about walls separating, comforting, alienating, etc. We're not sure where it’s going. Then the last poem reveals the poet has been thinking about a memorial wall she saw in Poland that was erected from tombstones that the Nazis had dug up and turned into sidewalks, an ultimate humiliation and erasure of memory. After the war, rabbis went on a painstaking search to uncover these particular slabs in sidewalks and transmute them into a memorial wall outside the synagogue.

The other large work on the program is Mulholland Fantasies, a piano quartet in five movements that I recently revised. The piece is an interior journey inspired by Mulholland Drive and the way it divides through the city of Los Angeles. The first 3 movements form a set. The last measures of the first movement repeat as the beginning of the second movement. The last measures of the second movement repeat as the beginning of the the third movement. The fourth slow movement features a high expressive cello solo. The finale is an exuberant piece reflecting my love for the lyricism in Schubert's chamber music.

Pianist Yevgheniy Milyavskiy will premiere Haftorah I and II, short pieces based on familiar Jewish tropes. Haftorah I presents the tropes in a virtuoso toccata of emotions—joyful, playful, even righteously disputatious. Haftorah II goes a bit deeper. It evokes the mystery and deeper feeling "inside" the tropes. I slow them way down into a moody, hypnotic meditation.