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Letters to My Daughters received its world premiere on the Cultural Caravan stage in June of 2025. Now—ahead of a studio recording for upcoming album release—Josh Halpern brings this special commission back to the Caravan’s stage with his longtime musical collaborator and a Cultural Caravan alum, pianist Yannick Rafalimanana.Josh first met with composer Scott Ordway to discuss this project in November 2024. Like so many, Scott was reckoning with the uncertainty of the world—in particular, how to discuss it with his two daughters, four and seven at the time. Their collaboration began to take shape as a love letter, time capsule, and urgent appeal to decency for his girls.
Scott began by writing five real letters—and generously allowed Josh to serve as his editor. They shared long calls and essayistic email threads, and their questions increasingly led them away from defensiveness and toward kindness, generosity, and humility: Can we experience wonder and optimism in the face of fear and uncertainty? How might we find courage in the face of failure, injustice, or threat of harm? How do we foster and preserve reservoirs of goodness and decency in ourselves and each other? How do we tell people that we love them?
A larger program grew around Scott’s new composition, comprising music written at times of profound sociopolitical uncertainty. Debussy’s Cello Sonata, a vibrant and unexpected suite composed as the global social order was being redefined by World War I; Bernstein’s Three Meditations from MASS, wordless reflections on the seed of faith each of us must find when our ancient rituals unravel under the weight of doubt, dissent, and disillusionment; three songs by Ilse Weber—a nurse and music teacher at Theresienstadt later sent with the children in her care to the gas chambers at Auschwitz—gorgeously reimagined by the brilliant jazz pianist Henrique Eisenmann; and finally, a lament named for the Arabic word for a mother’s grief over her dead child, composed specially for this project by Bruce Adolphe.
Letters to My Daughters is a stunning, devastating, and ultimately uplifting program about love and resilience. And by mining this contemporary moment through the lens of Scott’s paternal love for his daughters, this concert becomes a communal experience simultaneously intensely intimate and profoundly universal.
Claude Debussy: Cello Sonata in D minor, L. 135
Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto
Sérénade: Modérément animé
Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux
Leonard Bernstein: Three Meditations from Mass
Meditation No. 1: Lento assai, molto sostenuto
Meditation No. 2: Andante sostenuto —
Meditation No. 3: Presto — Fast and Primitive — Molto adagio
Bruce Adolphe: Thakla III*
Ilse Weber (arr. Henrique Eisenmann): Three Songs*
Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt
Und der Regen rinnt
Wiegala
Intermission
Letters to My Daughters*
Ring All the Bells
I Love Telling You Things
Tell the Truth
I Will Always Love You
The World is Bright
*commissioned and presented for this program
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Event venue
Pine Street Church, 1237 Pine St,Boulder,CO,United States
Tickets
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