In an Instant at the Allen Center

This program explores time and timelessness. How do we measure a moment? How do the moments that have come before inform who we are in this singular moment? The installment of Reena Esmail’s series of quartet miniatures, This is it, that we performed in Spring 2025 got us all thinking (and feeling) at the end of last season. Reena’s work invites us to fully inhabit the moment we’re living in and step away from our preoccupation with glances forward and back. Schubert’s music, and particularly his chamber music, somehow does both at once, inhabiting a sense of nostalgia while transporting us fully into each moment as it passes and transforms into the next. Strum draws on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, and has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.

Try as we might to live in the…