Close Encounters With Music: A Tale of Two Salons – Winnaretta Singer and Marcel Proust

The daughter of sewing machine industrialist Isaac Merritt Singer, Winnaretta Singer-Polignac was a force of nature, hosting everyone from Leon Bakst to Jean Cocteau and Jean Giraudoux to Prokofiev, Madame Jean Lanvin, Siegfried Wagner, Arthur Rubinstein, Arnold Schoenberg, and Edith Wharton in her Paris salon. More importantly, she was responsible for developing a new genre: “Great music for a small space by up-and-coming composers” in the words of Sylvia Kahane, her biographer, who will join for the four-hand piano “Bagatelle” by Winnaretta’s husband, Edmond de Polignac. Works either commissioned by her, dedicated to her, or that were performed in her mansion on Rue Henri-Martin, will be featured in our on-stage “salon”: Ravel’s Pavane pour un enfant défunte, Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata 1924, the sizzling César Franck Piano Quintet and songs by Fauré, Poulenc and Reynaldo Hahn. She also befriended Marcel Proust and his lover Hahn, who reciprocated with an evening at their Paris salon, inspiring a chapter in Swann’s Way. A rich tapestry in search of a certain time, place and personages.

Alexander Shtarkman, piano; Sylvia Kahane, piano; William Ferguson, tenor; Xiao-Dong Wang, violin; Grace Park, violin; Helena Baillie, viola; Yehuda Hanani, cello