2025-26

This evening explores how composers transform fragments of the past into new musical realities, each work serving as a meditation on different aspects of loss, memory, and cultural inheritance.

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Leoš Janáček's Overture to his opera From the House of the Dead (1928), was a re-working of his unfinished violin concerto The Wandering of the Little Soul, an uncanny match for an opera adapted from a Dostoevsky novel about a Siberian prison. The 2011 arrangement by Kimmy Szeto restored the overture as a chamber concerto for violin, invokes the work's stark themes of isolation and suffering with concentrated intimacy.

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Liza Lim's The Heart's Ear (1997), a meditation on a fragment of a melody of13th-century mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi opens the program with her characteristic exploration of hiddenness and revelation drawn from Asian cultural sources and Sufi poetics of bewilderment, loss, communion and ecstasy, "like birdsong beginning inside an egg."

Patricia Alessandrini's Abhanden (2022) forms the program's emotional core, simultaneously interpreting Mahler's "Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen" and Ives's "The Unanswered Question," focusing on their shared sense of suspended time and open-endedness. As the piece progresses, musical materials fall deeper into "Ives' cluster serves as a space of loss," ultimately dissolving "into a vibrating cluster, a kind of black hole of loss and after-loss."

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The evening concludes with Anton Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908), arranged here for small ensemble from by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur. This work, which Webern described as relating to "the death of my mother," transforms a tense pizzicato theme through twenty-odd variations, moving from late-Romantic lushness toward the compression that would define his later style.

Together, these works create a powerful examination on how musical fragments can bear the weight of profound personal and cultural memory.

Discussion with members of Argento to follow the concert.

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