To stock up on Latin American scores, Twin Cities soprano Maria Jette makes "research junkets" to the Library of Congress.
"There's an enormous treasure trove of really delicious classical music from the 'other America,'" she says, "but it's hard to get hold of scores, so a lot of musicians don't know much about it. You can wave your money at music sellers, but they can't get the scores to sell."
Jette will bring her music to the Lakeville Area Arts Center on April 3 as part of a Coffee Concerts series. Beginning this afternoon with the Ouchard Piano Trio, several artists will offer an eclectic mix of music in four Sunday concerts at the center, all in a setting designed to encourage a conversation between the performers and the audience.
The idea is to share some of the inspiration behind the artists' work.
Jette says she adores Montserrat Campmany's use of harp and flute in "Poemas de Cuyo," based on poems by Alfredo Bufano that describe the Cuyo countryside.
"You can feel the sun and hear the cicadas," she says, "and then there's a cooling breeze from the vineyards."
She'll also perform a lesser-known Villa-Lobos song called "Suite for Voice and Violin."
"This is just a voice and a violin," Jette says, "but this is wild music with texts about Brazil, including cowgirls and gunshots ... actually, just me singing 'Pow! Pow! Pow!' "
Like Jette, classical Indian Carnatic musician Nirmala Rajasekar performs worldwide. Rajasekar has been invited to play the veena and sing at Carnegie Hall, for the United Nations, and for poet, jurist and theologian Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi's 800th birthday celebration in Turkey. She collaborated on spoken word pieces with Robert Bly and Gary Snyder. In the fall, she will tour with Gaurav Majumdar, a disciple of Ravi Shankar. On May 15, she'll appear at the Lakeville center.
Speaking from Chennai, India, where she has been performing in front of thousands during their winter international music festival, she laments that, with big crowds, "you really can't see the audience and see whether you're touching them or not touching them."
In the intimate Lakeville setting, Rajasekar says, she may feel playful and do a "raga" (a set of ascending and descending notes that can be played a variety of ways) called "coffee" -- the space and the mood in which she is performing always drives her choices, she says. Classical South Indian music tends to be about 80 percent improvisational, she says.
Rajasekar says ears accustomed to Western classical music can glimpse the bending and oscillating notes of Indian music in "those trills, those glides, those slurs."
"Those are the essence of Indian music. Indian music is music between the notes."
Bass player Rolf Erdahl and his wife, oboe player Carrie Vecchione, of Apple Valley, started the concert series last year "on a wing-and-a-prayer effort," Erdahl says. They will perform on Feb. 13.
They aim for an intimate, casual setting where performers can discuss the work with the audience over coffee (this year, with region-appropriate foods), and they secured a grant this year from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council for their efforts. "It's been kind of a connoisseur series, with amazing performers in the area," Erdahl says.
Erdahl himself prefers playing chamber music. "You're really expressing yourself. You don't get lost in the crowd. You have to be intensely plugged into each other."
"It's always fun to be close to the audience," Jette says. "I like to talk a bit about the music, composers and poetry, so it's great when it feels like you're having a conversation rather than giving a lecture. I think a lot of people really enjoy being able to see what the players are doing, too, and that's easier when you're not sitting 100 yards away in Row Z."
Rajasekar's comparison of music to a kaleidoscope, with all of the pieces of glass representing notes, seems apt for the diverse series.
"We share the same notes," she says. "Each artist is going to do it differently. You tilt it in another way, you have a completely different arrangement."
Liz Rolfsmeier is a Minneapolis freelance writer.
