We answer the great questions of life through stories. Folklore forms part of our cultural inheritance: our art, knowledge, customs, beliefs, legends, myths, fairy tales, and the stories passed from one generation to another.

Folklore is not something we typically acquire through formal education. It is transmitted informally, from one person to another, through storytelling, imitation, and shared experience.

These traditions give expression to archetypes that reflect something of ourselves back to us, helping us confront the enduring questions: Who am I? Why am I here?

There are people who rarely read between the lines, and others who almost always do. Yet even those who do not consciously look for hidden meanings send messages that exist beyond their words.

Something similar happens in music. I have developed an enormous nostalgia for the spaces between works, the speaking silences that connect different musical traditions and historical periods.

These brief moments offer a glimpse into the no-man's-land between eras. The shorter the transition, the more intense the experience.

What might Vivaldi have felt hearing his music alongside the electronic sound world of Giovanni Sollima? What happens within us when the solemn prayer of Chopin's C-sharp minor Nocturne is answered by the extraordinary demands of Duport's Seventh Étude?

The works that follow move between musical cultures, from Baroque sonatas and Spanish folk songs to Johnny Cash, Sting, and Leonard Cohen. My own To L. Cohen began during the pandemic as an attempt to write a Baroque fantasia inspired by Cohen's Hallelujah.

Please hold your applause until the end, allowing the music and the silences between the works to become part of a continuous experience.