Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm
Program:
Richard Strauss, String Sextet from Capriccio, Op. 85 (1939)
Shulamit Ran, Lyre of Orpheus (2008)
Arnold Schoenberg, Verklarte Nacht (1899)
Artists:
Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins,
Anna Griffis, and Ken Hamao, violas
Francesca McNeeley and Joseph Gotoff, celli
Join us for our final concert of the 2026 season on July 2! Advance adult tickets are discounted until a week before the concert. Student, child and other reduced price tickets can be purchased at the door.
About the Program:
Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night," 1899) is one of the great emotional experiences in chamber music. Written for string sextet, it follows the arc of a late-Romantic poem: two lovers walking in moonlight, a painful secret revealed, and — through the sheer force of feeling — a transformation. The music doesn't just describe the story. It is the transfiguration.
Richard Strauss was asking a related question forty years later when he composed his final opera, Capriccio — a work entirely consumed by the debate over whether words or music matter more. The string sextet that opens the opera, played onstage before a singer has uttered a syllable, is Strauss's quiet, gorgeous answer. Both pieces share not just a philosophy but an instrument: the rare and intimate sound of six strings playing as one.
Shulamit Ran's Lyre of Orpheus (2008) brings the question into our own time, invoking the oldest musician in Western mythology — the poet whose playing could stop rivers and soften stone. What does it mean to inherit that tradition? What does music still have the power to do?