We open Season 11 with two works—written almost 200 years apart and on different continents— that tap the deepest corners of your soul while also lifting you out of the everyday and into the sublime. Shelley Washington’s 2019 String Quartet, Middleground overlays rhythmic grooves with sweeping melodies passing between the four voices. Schubert’s transcendent cello quintet shares some compositional DNA with the Washington, particularly an incredible emotional sincerity, and the ability to lift the listener onto beautiful waves as though being carried through the twists and turns of life. Schubert wrote this work in the late summer and early fall of 1828, and it reflects the freedom and joy of summer, alongside autumnal melancholy that perhaps hints at Schubert’s all too short life coming to an end. ~ Sasha Callahan

PROGRAM

Middleground | Shelley Washington (b. 1991) ~ 10 minutes

Cello Quintet | Franz Schubert (1797—1828) ~ 55 minutes

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Adagio

III. Scherzo. Presto – Trio. Andante sostenuto

IV. Allegretto