Bet you didn't know Jorge Bolet played THIS!

19 May 1944

Presidential Room of the Statler Hotel, Washington, D.C.

'Jorge Bolet of the Cuban Army and Pfc. [Private First Class] Erno Valasek [24 year old violinist from Cleveland] of the United States Army Air Forces Band this evening.'  Fior the benefit of the American Red Cross.

Featured will be Raymond Gram Swing's Fantasia quasi una sonata (in only its third performance).  

Present will be Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the Cuban Ambassador Aurelio F. Concheso and Señora de Concheso, Count and Countess Stefan Adam Zamoyski.  (Count Zamoyski served as an aide-de-camp to Polish Prime Minister-in-exile Wladislaw Sikorski in London during WW2.)

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Raymond Gram Swing (March 25, 1887 – December 22, 1968) was an American print and broadcast journalist. He was one of the most influential news commentators of his era, heard by people worldwide as a leading American voice from Britain during World War II.

He attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where his father was a professor of theology. As a youth, Swing was the proverbial "minister's son" and felt unable to live up to his parents' high expectations. Describing himself during his student days as "a prankster who found freshman math 'totally incomprehensible,'" Swing only lasted for a year at Oberlin. He later expressed gratitude for "how much Oberlin had given me—in music, in the first interest I had in the other arts, and in the basic liberalism of racial and sexual equality."

He wrote his violin sonata in 1932 (?) in England, originally composed in part for his musically-precocious 8 year old son Peter, a cellist. The extract below is from his 1964 memoir (the hotel name is incorrect [unless a different performance]. as is the Czech origin of the violinist - Valasek was born in Hungary and brought to Cleveland, Ohio at the age of 6.