Maurice Ravel once remarked, “Great music…must come from the heart.” His Piano Trio in A minor lives up to that remark with rhythmic patterns and subtle melodies that recall Ravel’s childhood in the Basque region of France and the emotions it wears on its sleeve. Similarly, Charles Griffes’s Three Tone Pictures uses the Impressionist style and exotic melodies to paint poems by Edgar Allen Poe. Serenades, those light and playful works dedicated to an individual and played outdoors, make up the central part of our second week. We often picture a young man with a guitar serenading a beautiful maiden on a balcony, but Reynaldo Hahn’s and Carl Nielsen’s serenades have something different in mind. Hahn’s Serenade, unpublished at his death, is classical in its structure and similarly restrained in its affect, as though our young suitor were shyly singing to his beloved. Nielsen’s cheekily named Serenata-Invano (or Useless Serenade) finds a group of men fruitlessly serenading a young woman only to give up and return to the pub for the evening.