Tales Without Words
An evening of storytelling and evoking your imagination

Part I – At the Forgotten Ball
The evening opens with Medtner’s Sonata Reminiscenza, a piece that feels like a memory rising to the surface before it has found words – searching, tender, incomplete. It leads into Bach’s English Suite No. 2 in A minor, where storytelling takes on the shape of Baroque dance, full of life, wit and reflection.

Part II – Encountering Fate
Bach’s English Suite No. 3 in G minor returns to that same courtly language in a darker key, before a set of Medtner’s Skazki (“Tales”) – some of the most explicitly narrative pieces ever written for solo piano, though what tale each one tells is left entirely to the listener. The evening closes with Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, a piece that behaves like a story in the truest sense: it has a beginning, a rising tension, and a conclusion that arrives less like a resolution than an inevitability.

Daria Vasileva is a Russian concert pianist known as an ambassador of Alexander Scriabin’s music, with a devotion to storytelling repertoire that extends to Bach, Medtner, and the great women composers history too often left off the program. Trained at one of Russia’s leading conservatories in Kazan and later at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne, Daria has won prizes at international competitions including the Smetana International Piano Competition and the Scriabin International Piano Competition, where she received the Special Scriabin Prize. In June 2026, she released her debut album, Scriabin: Elements, on the French label Aparté. Now based in the United States, Daria is building an active concert life across the country, with more than 80,000 people following her performances and reflections on classical music online.