The Waitsfield concert will include several collaborations with trumpeter Henry Whitaker, who lived in Waitsfield as a high school student and now lives in adjoining Warren when in Vermont. Henry will play the second and third movements of Haydn’s beloved Trumpet Concerto, composed for the first keyed trumpet in 1796, the year of the founding of the Waitsfield Congregational Church (now the UCC, host of this concert). Henry will also join me on Chopin’s first two Polonaises, written in 1817, the year Waitsfield Village was founded—and when the composer was eight years old. We will also play Henry Clarke’s crowd-pleasing Maid of the Mist.

The piano solo repertoire includes the opening movement of Beethoven’s A major sonata op. 101, also from 1817, and two pieces from 1913, the year the adjoining Joslin Library was built: Ravel’s “Waltz in the manner of Borodin” and A Real Slow Drag by Scott Joplin (Pcott Joslin?).

Novelist (and music critic, trumpeter, and composer) Ralph Ellison began his coming-of-age novel Invisible Man in a Waitsfield barn, where the opening line, “I am an invisible man” came to him and would not go away. In honor of the origins of this landmark of American literature, I will play Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue”, which the novel’s narrator describes in the prologue.

As with every concert in the project, this one will include its unique Scarlatti sonata: no. 50 in F minor for this fiftieth concert in the series.