Long Distance brings together piano works that speak to stories of displacement. Primarily focused on contemporary works written over the past 40 years, this program showcases composers — many of whom were dislocated from their countries, sometimes by force — who connect to their homelands through music both turbulent and peaceful.

Dana Brayton's A Little Traveling Music, written for Berman in 1993, opens the program with a feeling of unbridled energy and perpetual locomotion, featuring journeys across the keyboard that bring to mind Messiaen's bird songs and otherworldly harmonies. 

My Windows from the Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang showcases the ways both Eastern and Western cultures have influenced the composer's music — particularly in "Seven Rays of the Sun," inspired by an image in the Naimittika pralaya in Vishnu Purana, in which 100 years of rain pours down to envelop three worlds into one ocean.

Ravel's Une barque sur l'océan serves as a brief promenade between works, evoking one boat's journey across a vast ocean represented by fluid, pianistic textures and harmonies as ever-changing as the waves of the sea.

Kareem Roustom's powerful Aleppo Songs find the Syrian-born composer marrying original material with urban folk songs from Aleppo and a reimagined hymn from the Syrian Christian Orthodox (Antiochian) church. More than an ode to the musical riches of Aleppo, Roustom's songs also raise awareness of the refugee crisis that's devastated his homeland for more than a decade.

A new work from Arson Fahim showcases the composer's mission to preserve the musical traditions of his native Afghanistan that are in danger of extinction following the Taliban's return to power in 2021. Now a student at The Longy School of Music of Bard College, where he studies with Berman, Fahim's new work is a symbol of the hope and change made possible through love and art.

Fiesta en Caraballeda from the great Venezuelan composer Paul Desenne — who died of a heart attack earlier this year, a decade after fleeing his Caracas home amid the rising political violence — displays his fascinating ability to merge the musical traditions of European classical music and those of Latin America, including Afro-Venezuelan drumming. A talented visual artist himself, Desenne's Fiesta evokes a work of the same name by the revered artist Don Armando Reverón.

Although Anthony Davis is best known in the classical world for his jazz-infused operas charting modern African American history, he turns the calendar back several centuries in Middle Passage. Inspired by the sea route used to transport kidnapped Africans during the slave trade, Davis's work pays tribute to the approximately 12 million men, women, and children forced to endure the horrifying journey to the New World.

The compositions of Betty Olivero fuse aspects of Israeli and Jewish culture — including Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Hasidic musical traditions — with techniques of the European avant-garde. In Sofim (Endings), Olivero brings to light imaginary landscapes that repeatedly appear and disappear in the far horizon through wide dynamic contrasts and repetitious, freestyle rhythms that create endless possibilities for interpretation.