Lately, I've been making my way to Mountain Top Music on Friday mornings to rehearse with my friend and colleague Chris Nourse. We are preparing a program of music for violin and piano. I've lost track of how many such concerts we've prepared together, but I am enormously grateful to get another chance to undertake this work, or is it play? After all, we don't call it "working" the violin or piano. 

     Our program includes a brand new sonatina of mine that I finished this past summer. It's a set of four movements in different moods that all seem to relate to an idea I've been playing with for a very long time: that we are all in the same situation in this very temporary and changeable life. The title of the sonatina is "We are all in one Pond." The title came from some art-therapy I engaged with a few years back. The photo below might give you a hint about the themes that were running through my mind when I made that piece of art. Then somehow, similar themes emerged when I began writing this sonatina last spring. I crafted them into a piece that includes these movements "We are all in one pond,"  "Heaven is a resting place," "There is always time for adagio," and "We might as well dance." 

After this new sonatina, we'll play two excerpts from a Keith Jarrett sonata for violin and piano. You did read that correctly, even though you may be thinking "isn't Keith Jarrett a jazz pianist?" That is certainly true, but Jarrett wrote some interesting chamber music as well and played with other classical musicians of his day. We've had fun making sense of two movements from his sonata: "Song" and "Dance." The first movement reminds me somehow, of Hindemith's Trauermusik; it has depth and a certain inexorableness in it. Both the violin and the piano get to explore the edges of their instrument's sound range. The dance movement is quite fun and might be taken in as a form of contemplative movement in the interpretation we've developed for it. 

We'll end the program with an old favorite of ours: Antonin Dvorăk's sonatina for violin and piano. Dvorak wrote this for his own children to play. Chris and I have worked on this music many times with various students over the years. It's been a great joy to play it together. 

We'll be performing this program on Friday, December 5 at noon at The Majestic Theater in Conway. This is part of Mountain Top Music Center's First Friday series: a brainchild of Chris's which began in 2016 or so. Admission is free and donations support Mountain Top Music Center.