For young musicians, being accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia is like winning a golden ticket; it’s a world-renowned school of music, and all study tuition-free. Two years ago I was thrilled to learn that one of my daughter Alysa’s nicest friends, Justine Lamb-Budge, had been accepted there at the ripe old age of seventeen.

When she was just fifteen, Justine gave a recital that would have felled many a professional performer -– I believe on that single program I heard her perform two full-length sonatas, some virtuoso showpieces, as well as a Mozart Concerto and a romantic one, all of which she played flawlessly from memory. Her teacher, Kimberly Fisher, had been working with her for countless hours a week in a manner reminiscent of the great teachers of the 19th century, who live and breathe their art every minute of the day.

Justine and Kim were rewarded for their hard work when Justine was accepted to the Curtis Institute, a major coup for any student and teacher. That same week, Justine’s older sister, just eighteen, tragically died.

After Zoe’s memorial service, I lost touch with Justine and her family. They had to move several times, and I wasn’t able to reach them. I heard through the grapevine that Justine was doing well, though, and was glad to receive a note sent out a few weeks ago by her mother Deborah, inviting friends to hear Justine perform the Brahms Violin Concerto on a student recital two weeks ago.

The Curtis Institute appears low-tech –- it is housed in a dark old Victorian mansion near Rittenhouse Square, and the concert space is quaint and charming. But there is nothing quaint about what pours from the stage. That night four student violinists were featured on the program; I heard a remarkable Bach Sonata played by Yiying Julia Li, the unusual Ysaye E Major Sonata played by Ji-Won Song, and a lovely Ravel Sonata performed by Maia Cabeza.

The entire second half of the program was carried by Justine. It was a joy for me to hear her in this historic space, surrounded by friends and loved ones and fans. She brought to her maiden performance of Brahms’ only Violin Concerto the sweetness and richness of tone she has always had, as well as the strength of will that it takes not only to play this piece but to persevere, despite the most daunting of circumstances.

I hope this will be but one triumph in a long and meaningful career.

Last year a friend gave me tickets to Opera Philadelphia’s performances of Fidelio and Gianni Schicchi. I loved both productions. In Fidelio, Beethoven’s sublime music was well-served by Christine Goerke’s tremendous soprano voice, and the story was given a fresh sensibility by Jun Kuneko’s whimsical video set design. In Gianni Schicchi, the cast’s superb comic timing had me laughing when I was not all choked up from the sheer gorgeousness of Puccini’s score.

Convinced, I decided to splurge and, for $100 a ticket, became a Philly Opera subscriber this season.

On Friday my husband and I headed to the Academy of Music for the second show of our series, the East Coast premiere of Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul. I’ll admit that the title of the opera sounded a bit static, but I was eager to see and hear the new work, and glad to go on a date with my husband. When we took our seats, we were enchanted by the beautiful stage set on view, an Asian mirror-like gold-leaf screen that formed the backdrop to a platform that gave the impression of a reflecting pool.

As the lights dimmed, an aged hag shuffled downstage with the rest of the cast and began swirling incense. She swirled and swirled, hunched over her bowl, and soon the hall began to smell like a church on a High Holy Day. Why this hag was significant was never made clear, as she delivers no important curse or prediction. However, she provides an interesting visual prop, as do the three young women with slender arms suspended on platforms above the stage, playing rhythms into clear basins of water. Also entertaining are the young women who glide down the center aisles, sliding lighted batons along electronic instruments that look like electric bug zappers.

Tea: A Mirror of Soul is a visually stunning production with fabulous costumes, and an imaginative, sumptuous set. My favorite set piece was the enormous cube with the Taoist symbol on front, that opens up to reveal a staircase and an outsize design of peonies.

The music does not offend or inspire – although there are no memorable vocal lines, Tan Dun makes effective use of rhythm and orchestral color, often evoking Asian-inspired harmonies and instrumentation. But to me the production would benefit from greater emotional plausibility and narrative drive, and a more poetic libretto. It feels less like a drama in music, and more an effective work of visual art, fit more for a museum than for a performing arts hall.

As several women in the ladies’ lounge complained, “But I want to know what’s the significance of the tea?“

I agreed. We wanted to be moved by whatever was supposed to be so mysterious and spiritual about tea, or at least enlightened about the subject. Though the visual and auditory effects of the opera are certainly spectacular, we needed to believe the story more to become convinced.

But who am I to complain about Tan Dun’s vision? As my mother would say, “He’s up there, Debbie-ya, and you’re not.”

Sigh. Maybe I’ll go drink a cup of tea.

Long ago, if you lived in Paris, and loved art, and were lucky in friends, you might be invited to the salon of a wealthy, discerning patroness, and hear Chopin or Liszt perform their latest works. You would drink champagne and discuss what you’d heard with other art lovers. You would make a personal connection with the artist, and the whole experience would be heady, and marvelous. You would be a fan for life.

Salons flourished in Europe up to the early 1900′s, and provided an ideal outlet for contemporary art, for artists, and for connoisseurs. Nowadays, we learn about new artists in concert halls, on television, radio, U-tube and even in movie theaters. But the salon is not dead! One woman who understands this is Vera Wilson, who founded a remarkable organization called Astral Artists eighteen years ago.

I met Vera recently at a salon given by my friends Charlie and Sue Davidson for the rising young pianist Di Wu. Vera is an elegant visionary who served in the past as assistant to Eugene Ormandy. Once her three children were on their way to independence, she decided to start Astral in order to help young artists find an audience. Her devotion and energy have launched many a world-class career.

“It’s not a competition,” she told me. “Young artists apply and audition, but they need more than sheer talent to be accepted. We present them in concerts at various venues in Philadelphia, from concert halls to hospitals, and in private homes too. But the career consultation is the most important thing we do for them. While we help them, it’s important for them to work with us in developing their careers.”

An Astral artist who has been extremely successful in developing her career is Di Wu, who in the past year has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra and given her New York debut recital at Alice Tully Hall. At the Davidson home that evening, evoking a great range of color from their Steinway, she gave a dazzling recital of Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann (Davidsbuendler Taenze) and Ravel (Miroirs.) She ended with a thunderous performance of Franz Liszt’s concert paraphrase of Gounod’s Waltz from Faust.

Just as charming were Di’s comments about the works, describing Robert and Clara’s intense love for each other, her noshing and mingling with the audience in the kitchen at intermission, and her restaurant recommendations for a couple who were traveling to New York City the next day.

We were in a Pennsylvania living room that evening, not a Parisian salon of the 19^th century, but we made a personal connection with the artist. And that, in any time or language, is what it’s all about.

Students often ask me what it takes to enjoy a successful life in music. Well, talent is a must, of course. Beyond that, I think you have to be both 1. single-minded and 2. open-minded.

One young man who possesses all these qualities is Isaac Harlan. Right after graduating from Penn State University with a major in classical piano performance, Isaac won a national search and landed a full-time position as assistant musical director of Penn State’s Musical Theater program, one of the top-ranked such programs in the country.

I caught up with Isaac while he was on tour with the theater program, after a performance at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. With drummer Cory Daniels, Isaac skillfully drove the hour-long show, which ranged from sensitive ballads like “It Might as Well be Spring” to high-powered ensemble dance numbers such as “Michael Jordan’s Ball” from The Full Monty.

A glance at Isaac’s music score revealed sketched-out charts but no detailed notation. “And here’s a 32-bar dance break,” he said, showing me a few bold scribbles on manuscript paper.

Isaac began piano lessons at the age of twelve at home in Mount Lebanon, PA. Twelve is fairly late for a professional artist to begin training, and even then, he was not an enthusiastic practitioner until high school, when he began studying at Duquesne University’s City Music Center, where he learned jazz theory and improvisation from pianist Ron Bickel.

Also crucial at this time was his grandmother’s influence. Grandma gave him a recording of jazz pianist Gene Harris. After one hearing, Isaac said, he became “obsessed.” Suddenly, he was determined to make music his life, and at 18, he enrolled in the University of Michigan’s undergraduate jazz piano program.

When family economics forced Isaac to switch from an out-of-state university to a public one without a jazz major, he immersed himself in classical music, and became grounded in piano technique under the guidance of his Penn State University teacher Stephen Smith. He also worked in the university music library, took organ lessons and harpsichord lessons, and became equally obsessed with the classical record collection of his father Christoph (a business executive and former professional classical guitarist.) Adept and curious about every era of music, Isaac played with the Baroque Ensemble but served as official accompanist of the University Choir and Gospel Choir as well.

When a notice appeared on the music school bulletin board asking for a pianist to play for a production of the PSU Thespians, Isaac showed up. Even though he had never played a show before (this one was Footloose,) his background in jazz improv and his newly solidified classical technique proved indispensable -– especially when the musical director of the show suddenly quit, and Isaac found himself in charge.

Soon he became deluged with requests from vocal students to accompany and coach them. At the end of his senior year, the assistant musical director position at the university became open, and, despite his youth, Isaac decided to apply. I can only imagine the search committee’s five-second conversation: “An application from Isaac Harlan? Chuck the others.”

What’s ahead for Isaac?

Ever open-minded, and not content to drum along in a full-time job with full benefits, Isaac wants to continue to develop as a musician -– either in a top collaborative piano masters degree program, or in the professional music world of the Big Apple. With his talent, single-minded focus and love for music, and his open-minded ability to see and enjoy opportunity, I have no doubt he’ll succeed.

Earl Wild passed away Saturday, at the age of 94. He was my most brilliant teacher and one of the funniest and most remarkable people I’ve been privileged to know.

I grew up listening to Earl Wild’s recording of Rhapsody in Blue with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops; as a child, I mistakenly thought he was a jazz pianist. Then, as a teen, I heard him play the Chopin F minor Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center. Everything about that performance surprised me -– for one, that Earl Wild the “jazz pianist” played Chopin and also, that a concert artist could look like a debonair English lord, with his height, his white hair, his dove-gray business suit, the small, elegant steps with which he crossed the stage. Most striking of all was the grace of his playing: although I was not an astute listener back then, I recognized at the final note that I’d heard something of immense beauty.

Fast forward a decade or more to Columbus Ohio: at a campus record store, I bought an LP of Earl Wild playing the Tchaikowsky Concert Nr. 1 and the Liszt Mephisto Waltz, released by a small label called Quintessence. Not sure why, as I was steeped in Beethoven and Mozart at the time. But the minute I heard the slow movement of the Tschaikowsky, with its innocent lyricism, and his electrifying rendition of the Mephisto Waltz, I knew I’d never heard piano playing like this. It wasn’t the technique that floored me (though that was amazing) it was the gorgeous phrasing and the perfect motion of all the lyrical sections.

You can imagine my shock, when, a week later, leafing through an issue of Clavier magazine, I saw a full-page ad announcing that Earl Wild would be artist-in-residence at Ohio State University, less than a mile from my house! The solo recital I heard him give there a few weeks later (shortly before I gave birth to my daughter Alysa) is still one of the best I’ve ever heard: his Rachmaninoff Preludes still shimmer in my memory.

Even with an infant at home and working shifts in the E.R., I was determined to audition for and study with him. He heard me play just the beginning and the coda of the Chopin F minor Ballade and accepted me into his class. Thus began a six-year tutelage that shaped me as a musician.

As a teacher, he was both an innovator and a stickler for the minutest detail. He could play any piece in the piano repertoire, so he could demonstrate exactly what he wanted at the second piano. My innumerable scores of the pieces I studied with him (from Haydn to Chopin and yes, Rhapsody in Blue) are marked with countless instructions for fingerings, pedalings, phrasing, voicing, balance, where to slow down and speed up, which inner voice should imitate the French horn, where to “let go” so the piece can fly.

My husband Tom and I were granted the honor of hearing him perform many times at his home, and I sat in on several of his recording sessions as a page-turner. Once, while he was waiting to record a take, a train in the distance sounded, and without a second thought, Earl reproduced the dissonant chord on the piano before beginning to play.

The memories are many, and beyond the scope of this blog post, but here are just a few: hearing a private recording of him accompanying Lily Pons in the song “Estrellita;” his photos with Maria Callas; the Beethoven Sonata marathon he presented of all his students (we played until 1 a.m., to a packed house tempted by free pizzas donated by Pizza Hut, and wore powdered wigs in the publicity photo shoot;) visiting him in Santa Fe where he was good friends with its founder John Crosby; turning pages for the premier of his Stephen Foster “Doo-dah Variations” with the des Moines Symphony, flying back from Des Moines with his entourage on a private jet…

Earl had an irreverent sense of humor that was quick and apt. Once, when a favorite student complained that her “hands were so small,” he asked, “well, how big is your brain?” When someone else asked if it really was “correct” to re-distribute a chord so it was easier to play, he chided them: “Of course! Playing the piano is hard enough.”

About that, he was never less than honest. He practiced many hours a day (“if I don’t practice, my income goes down”) to achieve perfection at the keyboard. But his work was also his love. I know that he loved everything about the piano as well as the efforts of his fellow pianists — even when he was listening to a student performance, he was completely absorbed, focused, and energized.

So I will not say “rest in peace.” I will say, “Earl, may you thrill, trill, and ‘doo-dah’ forever.”

One of the joys of blogging is that I get to write about remarkable artists and cultural events that fly below the radar of mainstream media. However, on occasion, exceptions will be made, and there’s no better case for it than a concert played last night by Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented Hamelin at one of my favorite halls in Philadelphia, the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center, to a packed and enthusiastic crowd. Even though a review will no doubt appear in the Inquirer, I feel it’s my duty as a pianist to opine about one of the best concerts of the season, or of any season, for that matter.

Hamelin began with Alban Berg’s one-movement B minor Sonata, in an interpretation that was clean and transparent — more delicate angles than curves, more Capriccio than Salome. This was simply the warm-up act to an astonishing offering of the Liszt B minor Sonata. Hamelin’s speed, power and virtuosity gave this piece what it deserves and so rarely, by necessity, can get –- a breathtaking sense of direction that made one forget that bar lines had ever been invented. I have never heard the difficult parts of this piece played so convincingly and so fast. As a result, the scope of this long one-movement Sonata, one of the most important in the piano repertoire, was clear, fresh, and compelling.

The second half of the program began with four of the virtuosic Preludes from Debussy’s second volume. In these pieces, as well as those that ended the program, a selection of Hamelin’s own etudes, the pianist exploited the full range, color, and technical capacity of the Steinway at his command. His encore, the Haydn C Major Fantasy, was humorous and brilliant –- you’ve never heard Haydn like this, on the verge of full orchestral bombast yet winking with Charlie Chaplin-like pratfalls.

I take my hat off to Marc Andre-Hamelin. You’ve inspired me to give up blogging so I can practice more — almost!

Not many pianists would attempt to perform Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations at all, let alone right after Christmas, and especially not a few days after getting married! But Matthew Bengtson, just wed, tackled Beethoven’s monumental late composition fearlessly. I was one of the fortunate to hear his sensitive and virtuosic rendition on December 30, along with my daughter Alysa, home from Germany, and her friend Miriam, a recent graduate of Reed College. Both girls are accomplished musicians and gave the concert four thumbs’ up. I asked Miriam for a few thought about Matt’s program, which began with Schumann. This is what she had to say:

“Matthew Bengtson’s interpretation of Schumann’s Nachtstücke, op. 23, four short pieces inspired by the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, transmitted the sense of the uncanny that links the Nachtstücke with Hoffmann’s writing. Speaking to the audience before he played, Bengtson explained that the final movement, Einfach (Simply,) is Schumann’s way of commenting on and summing up the rest of the piece. As in Hoffmann’s famous story “The Sandman,” the narrative voices of Einfach are convoluted and often overlap, and create a doubling that mimics the conflation of characters and their autonomy (or lack thereof).

“The Nachtstücke cast an interesting shadow over Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, as another example of the uncanny, or Das Unheimliche (literally the un-home-ly.) It shows how a composer is able to take something familiar and make it ‘strange.’ Beethoven wrote these variations in response to a competition held by Austrian music publisher Anton Diabelli, who composed a simple theme for thirty-two prominent composers of the day to embellish. The quality of ‘making-strange’ is inherent in any set of variations on a theme, but especially apparent in these variations. Beethoven moves Diabelli’s simple waltz through thirty-three variations, taking the music so far from its ‘Diabelli home’ that it becomes completely Beethoven. ”

Alysa said she was particularly moved by the later slow variations, whose spiritual nature were in keeping with the concert’s setting, the intimate Church of the Holy Trinity Church on Rittenhouse Square. Roses, trailing evergreen, cascading ribbons and white candles (rather than the typical poinsettias) and a full-sized nativity scene at the altar captured the Christmas spirit. The concert was part of the Brown Bag lunchtime series offered every Wednesday at 12:30. As the audience quietly ate their sandwiches and munched on cookies, their tummies were nourished as well as their souls. It was an uplifting way to finish the holiday season and begin a new year.

My older daughter has been living and working in Germany since August, and I’ve missed her so much that having her home for two weeks was what I wanted most for Christmas. When I asked her over Skype what she wanted for Christmas, she said without hesitation, “Can we see the Nutcracker?”

“Of course,” I said, although I have to admit that normally I would rather attend productions of works I’ve never seen before. However, The Nutcracker is close to her heart, since she danced several parts in the Columbus Youth Ballet production when she was a child. She’s been a Gingersnap, a Candycane, a Soldier, and a Party Guest, and she never tires of it. So I happily got tickets for the Pennsylvania Ballet’s evening performance, the day after Christmas.

Well, folks, it was spectacular. The dancers were in fine form, technically and artistically; the orchestra, under the direction of Beatrice Jona Affron, played expressively and at an almost fearless pace. The Academy of Music, in all its gilt, crystal, and red velvet splendor, is the perfect setting for a ballet that has substance and depth to its layers of confection.

The Pennsylvania Ballet performs the famous version created in the ’50′s by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. Alastair Macauley explains Balanchine’s innovations, both artistic and psychological, in an article for the New York Times that’s fascinating to read. What strikes me watching this production are the wonderful touches of humor in the First Act (the energizer bunny drummer, the tipsy Grandma, the naughty, hyper little boys, the ammunition of Swiss cheese) and the magical transition of Marie’s Christmas Eve party into her dream world of the Land of Sweets. The big corps de ballet numbers, the Snowflake Dance and the Waltz of the Flowers, are, in their moving symmetry, deeply emotional, and remind me of the perfect form of J.S. Bach.

The score Tschaikowsky composed in 1892 still sounds fresh — tension builds in chromatic progressions as monumental as in his symphonies; color and melodic invention continually evolve. Who has ever heard created anything more hypnotic than the music for the Arabian Dance, for instance? I have no doubt that what makes this great ballet endure is Tschaikowsky’s music.

I’m sure it’s worth the expense to mount the fabulous sets (expanding Christmas trees and snowy landscapes,) and the elaborate costumery of tutus, satin, and lace. Most of all it’s well worth the added effort of involving a great number of talented children -– not just child dancers, but child singers as well. What a genius touch, actually, because the audience, even at night, was full of children. Booster seats were available for the tiniest of ballet watchers (and some of them were pretty tiny,) but I didn’t hear a single child cry, talk, or complain during the performance. The average age of those sitting in the seats was far lower than for the usual ballet, opera, or orchestra audience. I think that’s something to dance about.

Perhaps no one understands the Nutcracker better than a musician who’s performed it for 25 years, as has violinist Charles Parker. “If you have to play the same piece 25 to 30 times in a 3 week period, thank God it’s Nutcracker! ” he says. “Any other piece would truly drive me insane. And, any time that it starts to become boring, you hear a child in the audience laugh or say something like ‘Look at the mouse, Mommy!’ You feel privileged to be part of their new memory, and you play like it’s your first performance.”

I’ll applaud that.

On December 1, Bryn Mawr College hosted a cultural double bill called Julia Alvarez: Words and Music. Last week, I wrote about the first part of the evening, which showcased the four new songs Haverford music professor Heidi Jacob composed to poems of Julia Alvarez. Today I’ll talk about the second half of the show, in which Ms. Alvarez took the stage to read her poems and to speak about her life and unusual literary influences.

What radiates beyond both words and music is Ms. Alvarez’s irrepressible personality, a trait she deliberately tried to tone down when she moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States at the age of ten. At the time, she wanted more than anything to be an All-American girl (not realizing until later that she was already American.) Holding back her warm Latin side was a challenge, as the cultural differences puzzled her. For instance, when one of her teachers said, “Julia, I’m very disappointed in you,” she had a hard time believing the woman because the criticism was delivered in such a controlled, calm tone of voice.

My friend Ariadne, who was in the audience and who teaches advanced-level Spanish, told me later that she found herself thinking, “Yes! Sometimes I want to say to a student – you turned in such a bad paper, you can do so much better – I want to kill you! In Mexico City I would say that, but of course I can’t here.”

I suspect that Julia Alvarez’s irrepressible nature might have less to do with her cultural background, and more to do with who she is. As a child, she was “overly affectionate,” only allowed to fully express her love for her family members when she ironed their clothes. Ironing, she explained, was a privilege and a step up in the pecking order of domestic chores because “You could be trusted with something you could do damage to.” It’s beautifully shown in the poem she read called Ironing Their Clothes, where she is “forced to express my excess love on cloth.”

Domestic chores in general were the unlikely catalyst for her first collection of poems. She described how, as a young fellow at the MacDowell Colony, with the lofty canon of English literature in her ear (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and so on,) listening to the other fellows busily clacking away on their typewriters while she waited vainly for inspiration, she was suddenly freed by the sound of the vacuum cleaner in the hallway. She realized that her first training was in the household arts. She thought, “Why dismiss this?”

And so she produced her first collection of poems, Homecoming, as well as the poems in the following collection El Otro Lado about her muse, Gladys, a warm-hearted maid from her childhood who was always singing (and who, in the poems, abruptly stops singing whenever Ms. Alvarez’s formidable mother appears on the scene – perhaps a metaphor also for parental repression of Alvarez’s natural, exuberant impulses.)

Another of Ms. Alvarez’s muses was the old photographer who had the unenviable job of trying to capture all 24 of her father’s siblings and their offspring in the annual family photo. “You don’t know they are muses until you look back,” she said. Nor is it obvious at first what will become a departure point for writing -– an image as random as “men coming out of holes” (like manholes) has proved a recent whimsical influence for her lately.

The day following the concert and reading, Julia Alvarez spoke even more frankly about her work at an informal luncheon at the Women’s Center at Haverford College, when she spent time with students in Theresa Tensuan’s Contemporary Women Writers class. When Homecoming was published, Ms. Alvarez said, she wanted suddenly to silence herself, afraid of her family’s reaction. However, not a single person questioned her honest portrayal of family life; her aunts and mother even proudly displayed the book on their coffee tables. Since it was poetry, nobody actually read it! But when her first novel came out, exploring some of these events and observations in prose, her family was outraged, her mother especially.

“Why do you have to write about unhappy things?” her mother demanded.

Implied was the larger question, “Why read?” Ms. Alvarez described how, growing up in the outgoing Dominican culture, people told her, “If you read too much, you will get sick. If you read too much, nobody will want to marry you -–” a pointed reference to a bookish maiden aunt, who had given Julia and her sisters a much-loved copy of Scheherezade.

Ms. Alvarez said that as a child, she was not much of a reader; she did not like reading the censored material taught in the Dominican Republic, and she fidgeted in class (she thinks that nowadays she most likely would have been diagnosed with ADHD.) The stories she heard were not found on the printed page, but were told around the kitchen table.

Later, when she moved to the U.S., she discovered books. The kids on the playground were not particularly friendly to her, but in books, she was “welcome at the table” again. In the world of stories, she “could become anybody.” So although she came to reading late, she knew early on that this fellowship of writing, of story-telling, of words and literature, was where she wanted to be.

Julia Alvarez shared other insights into her creative life. Among the folders in her file cabinet, she keeps one called “Curiosities,” and another called “Letters Not Sent.” She writes, not to tell, but to find out about things. When asked why she did not write the screenplay for the movie version of her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, she quoted Chaucer: “Time is so short and the craft so long.”

A wise thing for all artists to remember.

Several years ago, my colleague Heidi Jacob took a sabbatical from conducting and teaching at Haverford College in order to study for her Ph.D. in composition. I was impressed; having earned two terminal degrees myself, I would not want to become a doctoral student again. Heidi was excited by the prospect, though; I could tell she couldn’t wait to plunge in.

She’s been back teaching for a couple of years, but I had yet to hear any of her compositions. So I was delighted to see a poster announcing that four of her songs based on poems of Julia Alvarez would be premiered on the Bryn Mawr College Creative Writing series, with Julia Alvarez herself in attendance.

“Tell me about this!” I said, when we saw each other in the hallway at the beginning of the semester.

With an enthusiasm she usually expresses for a particularly talented student we share, Heidi talked, eyes shining, not about herself, but about the great Dominican- American author’s work. “Gladys,” Heidi said. “Remember Gladys? The first song is about her.” We agreed we both loved How the Garcia Girls Got their Accents. And In the Time of the Butterflies. And Yo!

Accelerando to December 1, the evening of the premiere, which Bryn Mawr appropriately named “Words and Music.” When I arrived, a crowd had already gathered at Thomas Great Hall, on the majestically gothic Bryn Mawr campus.

Stepping into Thomas Hall is like stepping into a minor wing of the Houses of Parliament -– it is an enormous, rectangular space with a soaring ceiling, stone walls, and high mullioned windows. Acoustically it can be tricky, but the sound produced by L’Ensemble (the professional chamber group made up of Ida Faiella, soprano; Barry Finclair, violin, and Charles Abramovic, piano) was clear, focused, and full.

“Gladys sang as she worked

in her high, clear voice”

began Faiella, in her commanding, expressive soprano. Radiant, harplike colors produced by pianist Abramovic, and playful, sweet trills from violinist Finclair, gave Gladys Singing the compelling sound of tropical bird song.

However, nothing remains easy and amiable in this piece. At the end of Gladys Singing, the mother of the singer/narrator roars up the driveway in her powerful car, and in her high heels click-clacks up to the front door to enter the suddenly silent house. The birds stop singing, the music becomes static as a “tomb,” and the listener understands why Gladys, warm-hearted Gladys of the author’s childhood, became a muse and a symbol of life to her.

In the next song, Folding My Clothes, Heidi Jacob has changed the structure of Alvarez’s poem so that the bitter-sounding phrase composed to the final words

“until I put them on, breathing life back

into those abstract shapes of who I was

which she found so much easier to love”

is redeemed, musically, by the re-appearance of the rounded, berceuse-like first line, “Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again…”

“Are we all ill with acute loneliness” is the shortest song, yet terrifying in its bleak and deliberate use of pizzicato descending minor seconds (doubled by the piano) and the use of Sprechstimme to harshly speak the question, “and we are all well?”

The most dramatic song in the cycle is the final one, Beginning Again. In this complex piece, the listener is brought face-to-face with the immigrant girl’s sense of anxiety and loss, depicted by restless shifting meter and spiky dissonance. Gradually, the listener travels with the immigrant singer/narrator through reconciliation and hope, depicted by the use of an open-sounding descending modulation by thirds, an oasis of A major, a celestial-sounding B-flat major texture, and at the end, a sprightly and regular rhythmic pattern which brings us –- and are we not all immigrants, in our own way? — to the acceptance, and anticipation, of home.

With this last statement, Heidi Jacob achieves a satisfying symmetry for the cycle: the first and last songs are the longest, and, as the mood of the first song begins with comfort and ends with a sense of desolation, here, in the last song, the composer begins with unease and ends with hope.

There was a pause following the enthusiastic applause as Julia Alvarez mounted the stage and took the microphone. With her high cheekbones and petite frame, she bears a resemblance to Bryn Mawr’s most famous alumna, Katherine Hepburn, though the glamour this night was endearingly softened by a green pencil stuck into her upswept bun. Clearly touched by the musical tribute, she looked straight into the audience and said, “Who needs a funeral?”

She then began to read her poems with the poise, timing, and phrasing of a fine musician.

It was ear-opening to hear the author read the same poem that Heidi had set to music with such different results, most notably in Folding my Clothes. The inflections were in different places, the cadence hypnotic. Occasionally I have found myself at poetry readings, brain straining, wishing I were at a concert instead, but not in this case. The pure words, as read in Alvarez’s musical voice, held the audience captive with phrasing as seductively compelling as a Chopin melody.

Her introductions to the poems she read and the pearls of wisdom she bestowed on young writers will be discussed in my next post.

After the reading, I asked Julia Alvarez what it was like to hear her words re-interpreted through music.

“Like I said, who needs a funeral?” she said, glowing. “Heidi was able to bring out the emotion inside the lines.”

I thought about that. Emotion is outlined, heightened and dramatized by music in a way that enhances the words. Music makes us listen in a different way, forces us to experience the words with greater intensity –- that is, when the words are good, and the music’s good. They certainly were that night.