Orchestra of St. Luke’s: Composers of Note Series
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center’s collaboration with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s continues with a celebration of both mainstays of the chamber repertoire and significant works by living composers, with a focus on those championed in OSL’s Music in Color programming initiative.
Letters from Home
Monday, April 12
6:30 PM EST
Free
Composers Luigi Boccherini, Iman Habibi and Antonin Dvořák shared the common experience of uprootedness and all expressed their tangled feelings of the unfamiliarity of new environs and nostalgia for the comforts of home. In his Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, Boccherini hewed so closely to the sounds and sense of his home city of Madrid, he despaired that it might leave audiences elsewhere unable to comprehend its significance. In Uproot, Habibi meditated on leaving his home in Iran to settle in Canada. And in his String Quintet No. 3 in E-flat Major, Dvořák drew on the musical influences he’d absorbed in Iowa.
Plucked & Bowed
Monday, April 26
6:30 PM EST
Free
OSL Principal Harpist Sara Cutler joins OSL string players to perform a concert celebrating the versatility of the harp, combining recognizable classics by Debussy and Beethoven with unusual arrangements that expand the repertoire for the instrument. It will include a performance of Carlos Chávez’s Trio for Flute, Viola, and Harp, written for Philadelphia Orchestra harpist Edna Phillips, the first woman to hold that position.
Gabriela & Johannes
Monday, May 10
6:30 PM EST
Free
Unique instrument voicings and unexpected structural patterns establish Brahms’s String Quintet No. 1 as one of his most adventurous chamber works. The addition of a second viola to the standard string quartet transformed a piece for two pianos into one that prompted Brahms himself to write, “you have never before had such a beautiful work from me.”
In her Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout, Gabriela Lena Frank weaves together Western classical and Andean folk traditions, reflecting a vision of the coexistence of cultures without the subjugation of one by the other. This multi-movement work expands the traditional Western classical instrumentation of the string quartet by evoking Andean instruments and traditions.
All events in the series start at 6:30 PM EST