Davenport natives back to make beautiful music

Listening to how two famous composers wrote for both the voice and violin are on a new program for Chamber Music Quad Cities, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 18th at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Davenport.

The concert will feature music by Debussy, Beethoven, Reena Esmail, and Kurt Weill.

Reena Esmail (born 1983) is a female Indian-American composer who is on the Quad City Symphony’s 2024-25 season twice (in chamber music and Masterworks series programs).

Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence. She holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (2005) and two masters and a doctor of musical arts degree from the Yale School of Music.

Her piece for CMQC (called “When the Violin”) opens the program, a meditation on the violin itself, Tom Sauer (an acclaimed pianist and co-artistic director of CMQC) said in a Monday interview.

“It uses a lot of open strings and it’s a very nice concert opener and that’s how it will appear — welcoming people into the world of the violin,” he said.

“The point of the concert is to compare how composers write for the voice versus how they write for the violin and the piano,” Sauer said, noting the two here are Ludwig van Beethoven and Claude Debussy.

“With Debussy, we’re doing three early songs that are very accessible and lovely, at first hearing, they make perfect sense to the listener,” Sauer said. “And then there’s one much more complex and abstract song where Debussy himself wrote the text.”

His violin sonata (to be done after the songs) is also a more abstract, later composition, a more developed style.

In the case of Beethoven, his individual songs are not well-known, despite the fact that he wrote many of them, Sauer said. The vocal music will be performed by soprano Lily Arbisser.

“His instrumental music has such a big profile that the songs have a little bit gotten lost over the years or something,” he said. “These three songs, they show a very kind of sweet side of Beethoven, a very tender side of Beethoven and the violin sonata that we’re playing is much more people’s stereotypical version of Beethoven — the quite dramatic and stormy Beethoven, except that the middle movement has some of the same tenderness that the songs do.”

“He wanted to write for the voice all along, but he felt he didn’t have the knack for it,” Sauer said.

Right before intermission, Arbisser also will perform three songs by Kurt Weill (1900-1950): “Complainte de la Seine,” “Berlin im Licht,” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.”

Coming home to play

Both Sauer and Arbisser are Davenport natives who have made their careers based in New York City. They collaborated in a March 2022 CMQC concert at Asbury United Methodist Church in Bettendorf, and Arbisser returned that fall for the QCSO performance of a Holocaust-themed opera, “Two Remain.”

She mainly frequents oratorio and operatic stages, and she is also dedicated to art song performance in both salon-style house concerts and traditional recitals.

A snapshot of Arbisser’s broad repertoire includes Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew songs, music of contemporary American composers, and 12-tone compositions. She is enjoying a busy performance schedule this year, which began with a self-curated recital titled “Of Dreams” in Lenox, Mass., last month given alongside conductor/pianist Noah Palmer, featuring music of Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Wieck-Schumann, Weill, Debussy, Fauré, and contemporary American composers Nathan Shields, Emily Cooley and Sally Wyche-Coenen.

Arbisser also will present multiple recitals with pianist Dimitri Malignan and his “Missing Voices” project, dedicated to introducing audiences to the music of Jewish composers who were persecuted in the Holocaust and reclaiming space for these important works on the concert stage.

Sauer is highly sought after as soloist and chamber musician in a wide range of repertoire. Recent appearances include Carnegie Hall, St. John’s College, Oxford, and the Chamber Music Societies of Lincoln Center, Boston, and Philadelphia. With his long-time duo partner Colin Carr, Sauer has appeared at the Wigmore Hall (London), the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), and Da Camera (Houston).

He has performed with members of the Juilliard String Quartet at the Library of Congress and given many concerts with the Brentano String Quartet.

Arbisser said it’s always special coming back to sing in her home city.

“It can’t be overstated. There’s nothing like getting to go to your hometown as a professional to share what you’ve been working hard on,” she said Monday.

“There’s just nothing like getting to share with the people who helped make you who you are. Like, what you’ve been working on far away for quite some time every time,” she said. “I get to come home, there’s progress, there’s new confidence and new ideas that I have to bring to the stage and it’s really exciting to get to come, and put those in front of people who I have these long-term relationships with.”

The CMQC concert also features violinist Kyu-Young Kim, artistic director and principal violin of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, who’s widely recognized for his dynamic performances as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral leader.

This won’t be the last time Arbisser and Sauer (both based in New York) will be performing together this month. At the end of May, they’ll perform at a private book launch in New York for a friend of hers (Spencer Reece) who’s releasing his third book of poetry. It’s a new song based on one of his poems.

Tickets for the May 18 concert (at 3707 Eastern Ave., Davenport) are $20, available HERE.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WHBF - OurQuadCities.com.