Evocations

While "July" and "August" from Tchaikovsky's Seasons present literal and universal interpretations of summer, the pieces by Schubert and Rachmaninoff in this program offer evocations of summer metaphorical and personal.

The themes in the first movement of Schubert's piano sonata in a minor personify the duality of passionate love. The painful, unbounded longing of the first theme breaks in a summer thunderstorm, giving way to the breathless, rapturous peace of the second. The second movement's bucolic setting gives way to the windswept pursuit in the third.

Rachmaninoff's preludes, modeled after Bach's explorations of all the major and minor keys in his preludes and fugues, traverse a multitude of moods. From the pealing bells of a haunted cathedral to a rhapsodic march, a lily floating on a pond, a rustic dance in boreal woods, and a triumphant return to vanquish the cathedral's ghosts, these unique tableaux together constitute a journey, if…