Program Note:   

During the 1980s I would occasionally take high tea at the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to enjoy the place’s ambience and oddly lost-in-time feel. I always felt as though I was surrounded by lurid ghosts dancing to the insipid, blithely decadent salon fare—Gottschalk and Boulanger confections, Strauss waltzes and Herbert operatic paraphrases. There is an undercurrent of impending doom to these works, as though they were being performed by the tea band on the deck of a sinking ship. 

Commissioned by the Phoenix Concerts in New York as a companion piece to Valse Blanche, an operatic paraphrase composed for Ben Loeb and Livia Sohn to record on the Naxos label, Valse Noire imagines a newlywed soldier and his bride on their honeymoon sharing a glass of wine at the Palm Court the moment that the news of the shot ringing out in Sarajevo that changed everything arrives.

Like Blanche, the piece is a set of virtuosic, hyper-expressive variations. Noire tracks the young couples’ feelings as they realize that she will be left behind, he will likely perish on a battlefield far from home, and the world they know has ended. Valse Noire: Assignation at the Palm Court, 28 June 1914 was premiered March 27th, 2015 on a concert presented by the Phoenix Concerts Series at the Church of St. Matthew and Saint Timothy in New York City.