SALON 58 PRESENTS Letters to My Daughters - a special evening with cellist Josh Halpern & pianist Yannick Rafalimanana

Letters to My Daughters is a project by cellist Josh Halpern in collaboration with composer Scott Ordway. Now - ahead of a studio recording for upcoming album release - Josh brings this special commission to Salon 58 with his longtime duo partner, pianist Yannick Rafalimanana.

When Josh and Scott first met to discuss this project on Election Day in November 2024, Ordway was reckoning with how to talk to his two young daughters, then four and seven, about an uncertain world. The project took shape as a love letter and urgent appeal to decency: Scott wrote five real letters to his girls, with Josh serving as editor, and their long exchanges kept turning toward kindness, courage, and the question of how we preserve reservoirs of goodness in ourselves and each other.

The program gathers music written in moments of profound sociopolitical uncertainty. Debussy's Cello Sonata, composed as World War I redrew the global order; Bernstein's Three Meditations from MASS; three songs by Ilse Weber, a nurse and music teacher at Theresienstadt who was later killed at Auschwitz along with the children in her care; a lament composed by Bruce Adolphe, named for the Arabic word for a mother's grief over a lost child; and finally the five pieces Scott composed from the letters he wrote for his children.

Don't miss your chance to add this to the list of your unique live music experiences - grab your tickets now!

PROGRAM

Letters to My Daughters is a stunning, devastating, and ultimately uplifting evening about love and resilience - one that, by refracting this contemporary moment through a father's love, becomes at once intensely intimate and profoundly universal.

Claude Debussy: Cello Sonata in D minor, L. 135

1. Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto
2. Sérénade: Modérément animé
3. Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux

Leonard Bernstein: Three Meditations from Mass

1. Meditation No. 1: Lento assai, molto sostenuto
2. Meditation No. 2: Andante sostenuto —
3. Meditation No. 3: Presto — Fast and Primitive — Molto adagio

Bruce Adolphe: Thakla III

Ilse Weber (arr. Henrique Eisenmann): Three Songs

1. Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt
2. Und der Regen rinnt
3. Wiegala

Intermission

Letters to My Daughters

1. Ring All the Bells
2. I Love Telling You Things
3. Tell the Truth
4. I Will Always Love You
5. The World is Bright

EVENING SCHEDULE

• Doors open with welcome drinks & snacks: 6:30pm
• Music starts: 7:00pm
• Post-concert mingle: 8:00 - 9:30pm

JOSH HALPERN, cello

Joshua Halpern has appeared on stages around the world as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral principal cellist. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with artists including Jonathan Biss, Gary Hoffman, Kim Kashkashian, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Anthony McGill, and Itzhak Perlman, and appeared at music festivals including the Ravinia Steans Institute,Music@Menlo, the Perlman Chamber Music Workshop, La Jolla Summerfest, and Krzyzowa-Music. An eager advocate of contemporary music, he has worked personally with composers including Bruce Adolphe, Richard Danielpour, Kevin Puts, and Kaija Saariaho, and in 2025 debuted In Real Time, an expansive a commissioning series in which he spends a year in deep collaboration with a single composer to build a program for live performance and recording from that composer's musical world outward. He has served as guest principal cello of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, as cellist with the Banff Competition-winning Rolston Quartet, and as guest member of the Varian Fry Quartet.

Josh is the founder and Executive & Artistic Director of the Cultural Caravan, a Colorado-based performing arts series operating at the intersection of small businesses, social-service nonprofits,municipal organizations, and diverse world-class artists. The Cultural Caravan presents 35+concerts per year in coordination with dozens of local businesses and community organizations,reinvesting nearly $1 million into the community to date. Learn more at culturalcaravan.org.

Josh completed his Artist Diploma at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Carter Brey and Peter Wiley. As an undergraduate at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, he studied with Desmond Hoebig and won the school's concerto competition.From 2021 to 2023, he was a member of the Karajan Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker, in which he played 60+ concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker and was mentored by Ludwig Quandt. He lives in New York.

Josh performs on a cello by Domenico Busan, c. 1750, previously owned by his teacher Desmond Hoebig, provided on a generous long-term loan from a member of the Stretton Society.

https://www.joshuahalperncello.com/

YANNICK RAFALIMANANA, piano

French pianist Yannick Rafalimanana has developed an international concert career as a recitalist and chamber musician. Recent performances have taken him to halls all over the world, including the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Köln Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Chamber Hall, and the Kennedy Center in Washington. He has made chamber music with countless artists, including Kim Kashkashian, Steven Isserlis, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Arnold Steinhardt, and Itzhak Perlman.

As a soloist, he has appeared with the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, the Orchestre CNR de Lille, Orchestre Impromptu, the Ensemble Parisien. He has worked under the batons of Péter Eötvös, Maxime Pascal, Jean Deroyer, Lucie Leguay and Zolt Nagy. Yannick regularly appears at a wide variety of summer festivals, including the Perlman Music Program, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Osterfestspiele Baden-Baden, Sommerliche Hitzacker Musiktage , OCM Prussia Cove and Krzyzowa-Musik Festival.

Yannick is the winner of numerous awards and prizes, including the Borromeo Quartet Guest Artist Award, the Bruxelles J-Musiciens Competition, the Brest Piano Competition, and the International Ravel Academy's Rotary-Lions Competition. As the first prize winner of the 2012 Tufts/New England Conservatory Soloist Competition, he made his U.S. concerto debut in Symphony Hall in Boston, playing the Schumann Concerto with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Keith Lockhart.

Born in Lille, he began his musical studies at the Conservatory of Lille under the tutelage of Alain Raes. He later graduated from the Paris Conservatoire with first prizes in piano performance, chamber music, and collaborative piano performance. His teachers there included Bruno Rigutto, Michael Levinas, and Jean-Claude Pennetier. His chamber music and collaborative piano coaches included Francois Salque, Michel Moraguais, David Walter and Jean Koerner. Yannick then moved to Boston, where he obtained a graduate diploma from the New England Conservatory in piano performance and a master of music in chamber music as a student of Vivian Weilerstein.

Yannick has been teaching Chamber Music at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen from 2015 to 2018.

In 2022, he launched a concert series in his Berlin neighborhood called “Yannick’s Salon” bringing Chamber Music masterpieces to the local audience of Weissensee.

https://www.yannickrafalimanana.com/