Good evening to one and all, and thank you so much for joining us.

A very warm welcome to those of you who now are watching in on Wyoming PBS.

We're really proud and pleased to share the Grand Teton Music Festival with the whole of Wyoming.

This, as advertised, is an evening of storytelling, and storytelling is a beautiful thing for people of all ages.

Of course, little people love a story, particularly a bedtime story.

But grown-ups need and enjoy stories as well.

This story you're going to experience tonight is going to be told in sound.

You may know the author of this particular story, The Nightingale, Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish writer of the 19th century.

This particular version of The Nightingale you're going to hear was written just a few years ago, six years ago, in Canada by Canadian composer Kevin Lau, and I would love for you to help me in welcoming our players and our narrator to the stage for The Nightingale.

The following story happened many years ago in China.

The emperor's castle was the most beautiful in the world.

In the garden were seen the most wonderful flowers, to the finest of which tinkling silver bells were tied, lest people should pass without noticing them.

In the forest beyond the garden, there lived a nightingale who sang so beautifully that even the poor fishermen, who had plenty of other things to do, would stop and listen to it sing.

Travelers came from all over the world to hear the bird's song.

Those who could write poetry wrote beautiful poems about the nightingale in the deep wood by the sea.

These poems traveled all over the world, and some of them came into the hands of the emperor.

When he read about the nightingale, he exclaimed, "Why have I not heard of this creature?

The whole world knows what I possess, while I myself do not."

The chamberlain replied, "I shall look for the nightingale, and when I find it, I shall bring it to court."

So the chamberlain ran up and down all the stairs, through halls and corridors, but not one of those whom he met had heard of the nightingale.

He ran back to the emperor and said that it must have been made up, but the emperor insisted: if the nightingale does not come, the whole court shall be trampled upon after supper.

The poor chamberlain ran up and down all the stairs again, and half the court ran with him, not wishing to be trampled upon.

At last, they came upon a poor little girl in the kitchen who said, "I know the nightingale well.

Every evening, I take scraps of food home to my sick mother, who lives down by the seashore.

When I sit down to rest, I can hear the nightingale sing.

It makes tears come into my eyes, and I feel just as if my mother was kissing me.

So they all went out into the wood where the nightingale was wont to sing.

Half the court was there.

On the way, they heard many beautiful sounds coming from many different creatures.

"Hark!

There, there it sits," said the little girl, pointing out a little gray bird up in the branches.

It began to sing.

The chamberlain invited the nightingale to the emperor's court.

There, the nightingale sang so beautifully that tears came into the emperor's eyes.

He offered the nightingale his golden slipper as a gift, but the nightingale declined.

I have seen tears in the emperor's eyes, and that is the greatest gift for me.

The nightingale was now to remain at court, have its own cage, and liberty to go out twice a day and once at night.

The whole city talked about the wonderful bird.

One day, the emperor received a large parcel from the emperor of Japan.

"Here we have a new book about our celebrated birds," said the emperor.

It was no book, however, but an artificial nightingale, made to look like the living one, but covered all over with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

As soon as the imitation bird had been wound up, it could sing one of the pieces that the real bird sang.

"How beautiful!"

they all cried.

The imitation bird had quite a great success as the real one.

Besides, it was much prettier to look at.

25 times it sang one and the same tune, and still was not tired.

The music master explained to the courtiers what made the imitation bird so special.

"With a real nightingale, we never know what is coming next.

But with the artificial one, everything is arranged.

You can open it, explain it, and make people understand how the waltzes work and why one note follows another."

In the meanwhile, the live nightingale had disappeared.

It had flown out of the window back to its green woods.

All the courtiers thought it a most ungrateful creature.

It was banished from the country and the empire.

A year passed.

The imitation bird became famous across China.

Everyone knew the artificial bird's song by heart, and that was just why it pleased them now more than ever.

They could sing with it, and often did so too.

One evening, something inside the bird suddenly snapped.

And then the music stopped.

The emperor fetched the watchmaker, who tried to repair it in vain.

Now it was a fragile thing, doomed to sing once a year, lest it break forever.

Five years had now passed, and a great sorrow fell upon the land.

The emperor was ill and would not live long.

He lay cold and pale on his splendid bed, the artificial bird at his side.

One night, the emperor opened his eyes and saw death.

He cried out for the artificial nightingale to sing to him, to comfort him.

But the bird was silent.

Suddenly, from the window came the sound of sweetest singing.

It was the real nightingale, sitting on a bough outside.

It had come to console the emperor in his time of suffering.

The nightingale sang of the quiet churchyard where the white roses grow, and where the fresh grass is moistened by the tears of those who are left behind.

Death floated out through the window and disappeared like a cold white mist.

The emperor begged the real nightingale for forgiveness and asked the bird what it wanted in return for saving his life.

The nightingale said, "I drew tears from your eyes when I first sang to you.

That is reward enough."

From then on, the nightingale was free to come and go as it pleased.

But each night it came to the emperor's window, singing songs of joy and songs of sorrow, until at last he fell asleep, his dreams forever accompanied by the sweet melodies of the nightingale.

We're moving on to our second story, and in order to do this, we have to go back in time 300 years.

Now the piano didn't exist then, so we're going to have to say a brief farewell to the piano, and bring its predecessor, the harpsichord, up to the front.

We're meeting the composer Antonio Vivaldi in Venice, in Italy, 300 years ago.

Now he was trained as a priest, and he had vivid red hair, so he was known as "the red priest."

But rather than practice in church, he was also a virtuosic violinist and a composer, and he composed more than 300 of this next sort of piece of music we're going to hear.

It's called a concerto, and a concerto has one solo instrument, and it can be any instrument.

Could be the violin, could be the piano, could be the oboe.

In this case, it's the violin, and it's accompanied by a group of string players, and in this case, also the harpsichord, which is the keyboard instrument of the time.

You probably are familiar with the music of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," and you're going to have the chance to hear two of them this evening, and this is a musical expression of the times of the year.

This is the first ever example of a composer who composed music which was called programmatic.

And that means it had something extra besides just the music.

And we know this in this case because Vivaldi not only composed this great music, but he provided a poem for each movement that you'll hear.

And these poems you're going to hear tonight, translated into English, which Meaghan will speak, and a very special guest, our Wyoming-based poet Matt Daly, will give you his modern-day version of the same ideas on the opposite side of the stage before each movement.

And these poems are brilliant because they'll help us to know what to listen for in the music.

And our violin soloist Maria Ioudenitch, she's a dynamic, creative, beautiful young violinist, and she is leading this chamber group all by herself.

And you'll see how she does it by the movement of her body, by the movement of her bow, the expression on her face.

Our (two of the) "Four Seasons" ensemble join the stage.

Spring has arrived with its fun festive airs.

The birds sing out a sweet song.

The spring waters, also the whispering breezes, make a sweet murmur as they flow along.

A dark cover then falls over the sky.

Thunder, lightning, as if calling the chosen.

Then that quiets down.

The birds return and go back to singing their songs.

An evening, like many important events, takes a long time to come together.

For many mornings, little birds hide out in the chokecherry branches, and then later give away their locations with songs.

The choke cherries themselves swell their buds to blossom and release a smell so perfect even the robins fall silent, and the automatic light over the neighbor's garage leaves the rest of the day alone to become the day it becomes.

Later, out on the flowering meadow, under soft rustling branches and leaves, the goat herder sleeps beside his faithful dog.

For a moment, nothing seems to move.

Flowers give way to the inkling of fruit.

One or the other of us may feel a little more alone on one afternoon than we were, or than we will be on another.

Many of us get together in an open space, just like this, where someone else or many someones do what they can to make us feel less alone.

Bagpipes play their celebrations.

Nymphs and shepherds dance all around beneath the brilliant springtime skies.

What comes about that we call an evening, and all the breathing things, and things carried on their breaths, and things made in the act of breathing, and things embraced by breath go on revealing themselves in one way or another, or in so many ways as to become like you, your exquisite self, and not at all alone.

This is the important event: coming together into a morning, a day, an afternoon, an evening, a night, and then into many others on their way to becoming bright selves in motion, in color, in shape, in word and song, which all of us together, if centered in an open space, can become.

Frigid and shivering in the new fallen snow, relentlessly blowing terrible wind, pounding our feet as we run to keep warm.

The air is so cold it makes our teeth chatter.

One.

How many places like this?

Railroad tracks, or a road, or railroad tracks and a road near a river, near a north slope darkened by conifers, whitened by recent snow, a little frozen fog off a riffle, men in canvas coats working by the tracks or by the road, or a deer, or men working and a little group of deer near one another but not together, a raft of ducks in an eddy, a bridge over the river, more likely to be part of the road because these days we shortcut more often than we sinew.

The predictable hiss of motion and the winter silence.

Two.

And then you feel that feeling in your head as if before an earthquake, but what fizzles in you subsides to the regular tinnitus, and then the storm bellows the little place you rent like a little lung.

Spending the day sitting still by the fire, with heavy rain falling outside.

Three.

It feels nice at first to flip through the pages of a magazine early on December 21st, and to come across a glossy red snail in a process of growing a shell on some green moss on some patch of temperate rainforest.

At least you think it's a snail forming its shell.

It might be two slugs gripping an opalescent stone.

You could read a little and find out.

You're alone in the morning dark in that way that already has you contemplating what to drink and when to start drinking it.

Four.

You want to hold hands with everyone you love at once.

This childish desire you've never grown out of.

You understand the impulse you think toward iconography of deities with sundogs of multitudinous arms, and also deities dissolving in your mouth or in salt.

Walking across the hard frozen ice, carefully stepping, we try not to fall.

One quick turn, and you fall to the ground.

Getting back up, running again, so the ice does not break apart under our feet.

All the winds raging, Scirocco and Boreas.

All this is winter, with joys of its own.

Five.

Sometime today you might stand on the levee road to the gravel pit in your down jacket and watch a raft of golden eyes, and perhaps, if you're lucky, a bufflehead.

You might draw your hands from your gloves and squeeze your fingers together until they redden with a little extra blood, or maybe just from the wind, from the predicted cold front.

Six.

Is this love of the darkest day, or just one of those things you've read?

Such color and such energy.

That brings us to our last story for the evening, our last musical offering.

And I am persuaded that writers need to continue to write, painters need to continue to paint, thinkers need to continue to think, and composers need to continue to compose.

And this is how our chamber music initiative commissioning project, titled Kaleidoscope, was born.

Kaleidoscope is a project where we are commissioning one brand new chamber music piece each year, and I'm thrilled to tell you, in case you don't know already, that this last piece on the program is composed by one of our brilliant clarinetists in the Festival Orchestra, José González Granero.

Not only though is he a brilliant clarinetist, you turn that dial of the kaleidoscope, and you learn that he's a composer and a brilliant one.

And it was my great pleasure to ask him if he would please consider writing a piece for us.

So this is the only piece on the program tonight where have no text; rather, we have a title, a Japanese word, hojoki, which refers to a 10 by 10 simple hut.

I believe, and from what José has shared with me, that this is our chance to enter that isolation, sit with ourselves, and feel what we feel, sense what we sense.

I'm really thrilled to announce this trio this evening.

These three women are just fantastic musicians in their own right, and together they have had a beautiful experience bringing this piece to life for the very first time ever.

And I hope you feel the privilege of hearing this piece, the world premiere of Hojoki, a piece which I hope the world will continue to play and hear 300 years into the future.

Please join me in welcoming our piano trio to the stage.