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.

One story that I imagined unfolding in the Palm Court concerns a young soldier and his bride on their honeymoon enjoying their first high tea together. Observed from the point of view of the cellist and pianist playing that day, the young lovers hold hands as they listen. At a certain moment, news arrives that that the shot that would change everything has rung out in Sarajevo, taking the lives of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, and ending forever a world now lost.

On March 27th, 2015, pianist Di Wu and cellist Adrian Daurov premiered Valse Noire: Assignation at the Palm Court, 28 June 1914 on a concert presented by the Phoenix Concerts Series at the Church of St. Matthew and Saint Timothy in New York City. Valse Noire is part of a diptych which also includes Valse Blanche: How Love Comes, Tangiers, October 1958, for violin and piano.