"Eternal Quest" Insights

Will we ever discover the answers to all the important questions in life? Perhaps not, but it is the noble search for answers that defines us. Our Classics II concerts, entitled “Eternal Quest,” embody that sense of wondering and exploration.

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde portrays a search for eternal love, based on the Medieval legend and infused with a healthy dose of Schopenhauer’s 19^th-century philosophy. The drama’s famous Prelude and Love Death, with passages unfolding in beauty yet defying resolution, create the “insatiable longing” of the main characters—the harmonic language and melodic technique that Wagner developed would influence the course of music history.

Bloch was in the process of making a musical setting of King Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes when he came to an important realization: rather than using sung text, his work could gain an entirely new dimension with the voiceless beauty of the cello. The resulting masterpiece is Schelomo, expressing Solomon’s quest for meaning. Taking on the powerful and compassionate solo role is Israeli cellist Amit Peled, a fast-rising international star.

Charles Ives was one of America’s most forward-looking experimentalists, stretching the imagination and employing concepts way ahead of his time. A brief work written around 1906, The Unanswered Question delivers a novel take on the perennial question of existence, with three independent streams of music separated by space and time.

Elgar’s beloved Enigma Variations is a set of character tributes to dear friends. Here the searching and questioning is our fate rather than the composer’s. Elgar claimed his main theme was based on a famous tune, yet he never revealed his source, and the resulting thematic mystery remains debated to this day! No matter, for the work takes us on a splendid journey in Romantic style, artfully juxtaposing intimate and grandiose effects and leading to an exultant conclusion.