Ravel & Shepherd

Ran Dank gives the Festival’s first-ever performance of Rachmaninoff’s original, 1913 version of his Piano Sonata No. 2—a massive work with regard to its drama, intensity, and virtuosic demands—and Leila Josefowicz and Paul Watkins play a very different kind of work by Ravel: the lean and animated (yet also highly demanding) Sonata for Violin and Cello, written in tribute to Debussy. Before both works, Josefowicz and Watkins open the program with the New Mexico premiere of a Festival-commissioned piece by Sean Shepherd, whom The New York Times hailed as “an exciting composer of the new American generation.” 

SEAN SHEPHERD Latticework for Violin and Cello (Festival Co-Commission, New Mexico Premiere) 

RACHMANINOFF Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 36  

RAVEL Sonata for Violin and Cello, M. 73 

Ran Dank, piano; Leila Josefowicz, violin; Paul Watkins, cello 

Approximate length: 1 hour and 10 minutes