Program Note:

During the 1980s, the composer occasionally frequented the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, drawn to its faded, lost-in-time ambience. The space seemed populated by lurid ghosts dancing to blithely decadent salon fare—the confections of Gottschalk and Boulanger, Strauss waltzes, and Herbert operatic paraphrases. Beneath the surface of this music lies an undercurrent of impending doom, as though performed by a tea band on the deck of a sinking ship.

Commissioned by Phoenix Concerts as a companion piece to Valse Blanche—an operatic paraphrase recorded by Ben Loeb and Livia Sohn for the Naxos label—Valse Noire: Assignation at the Palm Court, 28 June 1914 materializes this historical anxiety. The work imagines a newlywed soldier and his bride on their honeymoon, sharing a glass of wine at the Plaza at the exact moment news arrives of the assassination in Sarajevo—the catalyst for World War I.

Like its companion piece, Valse Noire is cast as a set of hyper-expressive variations. The music charts the young couple’s psychological trajectory as they realize the irreversible fracture of their world: she will be left behind, he will likely perish on a distant battlefield, and the era they knew has ended.

Valse Noire was premiered on March 27, 2015, by the Phoenix Concerts Series at the Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy in New York City.