Souvenir: Tchaikovsky Sextet at PSU, College of the Arts, Lincoln Performance Hall

Music can be a time-travel device or a teleportation machine. A chord progression might whisk you back a decade or two, like to a Tuesday in April. Or, the hint of a melody might bring to mind the sights and sounds of a foreign land you once visited. Composers continually draw on this miraculous sound-memory to create “musical postcards” that express their memories, and inspire ours.

Adventure awaits with Maurice Ravel’s set of art songs, Chansons madécasses, inspired by the African tropical isles and set to evocative French poetry voiced by the captivating Jennifer Johnson Cano. We’ll also travel in time to one of the most exciting eras of our own music and experience the world premiere of Steven Banks’s homage to the great Nina Simone in a piece that conjures the iconic style and voice of one of America’s most influential musicians. And finally, Tchaikovsky’s famous Souvenir de Florence is literally a “wish-you-were-here” postcard to us, and exudes all of the warmth, vibrancy, and joy of his beloved visits to Italy to escape Russian winters.

Sponsored by Marvin & Abby Dawson.

Steven Banks’s piece was commissioned by CMNW with the generous support of the members of the CMNW Commissioning Club.