Guest Artists: Joseph Bognar and Nicole Lee, piano

“The choreographer George Balanchine once said that ‘dancing was music made visible.’ The opposite is also true: ballet music is dance made audible. And while it may seem strange to be listening to an entire ballet without the dancing, … great ballet music loses nothing when transferred to the concert hall.” -- Yvonne Frindle (St. Louis Symphony program notes)

Beethoven worked on two ballet projects during his lifetime:  the first was as a ghostwriter, providing music for a ballet that was attributed to his patron Count Waldstein; the second was the much larger Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, which premiered in Vienna in 1801. The ballet follows the creation of humankind by Prometheus, who ignites life with the divine spark of fire from heaven. As the various numbers of the ballet unfold, the new creatures are introduced to reason, music, science, and dance, and are thus equipped to go out into the world. The overture  remains a staple of the concert repertoire today.

Even before The Nutcracker premiered in 1892, Tchaikovsky constructed this enduring suite by selecting eight numbers from the full ballet to be used in concert performances. The ballet itself took some time to become the perennial Christmas classic that we have come to know. Performances by the San Francisco Ballet (1944) and the New York City Ballet (1954) helped secure the enduring place it now holds in the repertoire.

Aaron Copland’s “cowboy ballet” Billy the Kid had its premiere performance on the Lyric Opera stage in Chicago in a version scored for two pianos (October 16, 1938).  The title role was danced by the choreographer Eugene Loring.  In scoring the ballet, Copland attempted to write in a simplistic manner that both depicts the character of Billy and keeps the music in a supporting role that complements the dance.  To underscore this simplicity, Copland used cowboy songs such as “Great Grand‑Dad,” “Git Along Little Doggies,” and “Goodbye, Old Paint,” and transformed them into an artful tapestry.  The entire work opens and closes with Copland’s signature sound: open sonorities which evoke the wide expanse of the American West.  To describe the action in the middle, here is Copland’s own narration of the events from “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet:”

            ...The central portion of the ballet concerns itself with significant moments in the life of Billy the Kid.  The first scene is a street in a frontier town.  Familiar figures amble by.  Cowboys saunter into town, some on horseback, others with their lassos.  Some Mexican women do a Jarabe which is interrupted by a fight between two drunks.  Attracted by the gathering crowd, Billy is seen for the first time as a boy of twelve with his mother.  The brawl turns ugly, guns are drawn, and in some unaccountable way, Billy’s mother is killed.  Without an instant’s hesitation, in cold fury, Billy draws a knife from a cowherd’s sheath and stabs his mother’s slayers.  His short but famous career has begun.  In swift succession we see episodes in Billy’s later life. At night, under the stars, in a quiet card game with his outlaw friends.  Hunted by a posse led by his former friend Pat Garrett, Billy is pursued…. Tired and worn in the desert, Billy rests with his girl.  (Pas de deux). Starting from a deep sleep, he senses movement in the shadows.  The posse has finally caught up with him.  It is the end.

Cécile Chaminade was a prolific composer and pianist, making concert tours throughout Europe and to the US (1908). The two selections tonight are taken from her ballet symphonique Callirhoë, premiered at the Grand Théâtre de Marseille in 1888. Reportedly at the premiere, the scherzettino received an encore. Chaminade’s arguably best known piano work, “Scarf Dance,” also comes from this ballet. The story follows Callirhoë, an enslaved princess who rejects her captor Alcmaeon and ultimately leaps into the sea, where Venus transforms her into a marble statue. Moved by Alcmaeon’s steadfast refusal to forget his love, Venus restores Callirhoë to life, who now requites his love, and the work concludes with their joyful union.

Inspired by the Symbolist poet’s Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, Debussy’s tone poem (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune) is a 110-measure work that evokes the mythical faun (half-human, half-goat) awakening, imbibing, playing the flute, and engaging with the various forest nymphs before resuming his slumber. The work was first staged as a ballet in 1912, with the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky as choreographer and the main dancer. The staging took its inspiration from the art of Grecian urns, with dancers moving in straight lines along the stage in profile. Segments of the audience and critics found Nijinsky’s erotic on-stage gestures to be indecent. The very next year, Nijinsky would create another scandal in Paris as the choreographer for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Gluck’s reworking of his Italian opera (Orfeo ed Euridice) for Parisian audiences included a number of changes, including the integrating of ballet into the drama. The “Dance of the Blessed Spirits,” originally scored for solo flute and strings, occurs in the opera’s second act on the Elysian Plains, the eternal paradise of Greek mythology.

The impetus for La valse came from a commission from Serge Diaghilev, who asked Ravel to compose a ballet to be paired with Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Diaghilev ultimately did not find the piece to be viable for dancing and the 1920 premiere occurred as a concert work. The first choreographed version of the work took place in Antwerp in 1926.  In translating the work to the piano, the performers must strive to create a palette of rich and varied colors that evoke the orchestra. As the piece unfolds, Ravel’s treatment of the waltz themes becomes more and more grotesque.  Written after the conclusion of the Great War (WWI), some attribute the disfiguration of the waltz as a response to German aggressions before and during the war.  What first exists as a tuneful Viennese dance becomes a thunderous juggernaut of sound -- beauty and grace are transformed into a terrifying menace.

--Notes by the performers

Joseph Bognar is the Frederick A. and Mazie N. Reddel Professor of Music at Valparaiso University, where he teaches music theory and piano, and since 2012, he has held the post of Associate University Organist. He completed undergraduate studies in piano and organ at Valparaiso University, where he graduated summa cum laude. Awarded two university fellowships, he studied piano with internationally renowned accompanist John Wustman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his DMA in Performance and Literature.

He has played to enthusiastic audiences in the United States, Europe, and Asia and served on the faculties of the Maud Powell Music Festival, Lutheran Summer Music, and the Stamford International Music Festival, where he received acclaim for “his superb technique … one could only marvel at this talented performer.” (Evening Telegraph, U.K.). He was a founding member of the Castillon Piano Trio, whose performances in the United Kingdom were featured on BBC radio. His live chamber performances from Symphony Center, Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center have aired on WFMT-FM, while his solo performances have featured some of the most formidable 20th-century piano works, including Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and Ives’s Sonata no. 2: Concord, Mass. Since 2014, his piano duo collaborations with pianist Nicole Lee have enthralled audiences with their powerful, energetic, and dynamic programs. The duo’s repertoire over the course of the last decades includes over thirty major works for two pianos and piano four-hands. With a unique versatility as a pianist, organist, and harpsichordist, he continues to perform in concerts, festivals, and conferences nationally and internationally.

With a focus on administration since 2009, he has served as Chair of the Department of Music at Valparaiso University (2009-2018; 2023-present). Other administrative roles at the University included Vice Chair of the Faculty Senate (2022-2024) and Co-Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee (2021- 2023). He is the President of Pi Kappa Lambda (the national music honor society) and is a visiting team chair for the National Association of Schools of Music in the work of music accreditation across the nation.

Recent teaching interests have drawn him towards collaborations with colleagues in the STEM disciplines. In conjunction with the Department of Computer Science at Valpo, he developed and team-taught an interdisciplinary course in computational music, and he has mentored student research projects combining music with engineering and mathematics. As a further musical expression of these collaborations, he is the founder of ValpLork, Valparaiso University’s first laptop orchestra. This year, he is teaching a course on the history, theory, and design of video game music.

Nicole Lee, a native of Vancouver, Canada, is a pianist acclaimed as both a soloist and a collaborative artist. The Bradenton Herald lauds, “Lee is a consummate artist who exhibits a carefully honed touch with the beauty and refinement of fine porcelain.” As a soloist, she has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Sarasota Opera House, the Orpheum in Vancouver, Canada, and for CBC Radio in Ottawa, Canada. She has also performed as soloist with several symphony orchestras, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Florida West Coast Symphony, and the New Westminster Symphony, and Kalamazoo Philharmonic and the Valparaiso University Symphony Orchestra. Last year she performed Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto with the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra in Appleton, Wis., and also Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto with the South Bend Philharmonic. Her awards include First Runner-Up in the International Stravinsky Awards Competition, First Prize in the Pasadena Fine Arts Club Competition, and Semi-finalist in the Royal Over-Seas League Competition in London.

Lee is also active as a chamber musician. She continues to perform collaborative recitals with instrumentalists and especially enjoys presenting 4-hand piano repertoire with colleague Joseph Bognar. Ms. Lee has performed on the concert series at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Saugatuck Hempy Keyboard series, and the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago.  Recently she has been a recitalist with colleagues from Lutheran Summer Music in Minneapolis and Rockford, Ill.

Lee holds B.M. and M.M. degrees in piano performance from the University of Southern California, where she studied with John Perry. She was named outstanding graduate of the Keyboard Studies Department in both graduate and undergraduate programs. She also holds performance and teacher’s diplomas from the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto and Licentiate and Fellowship diplomas from the Trinity College of London. She is currently a member of the music faculty at Lutheran Summer Music and Valparaiso University where she thoroughly enjoys teaching high school students from all over the country and performing with colleagues.