Violist Ettore Causa, a member of the esteemed Steans Institute faculty, joins Steans Piano & Strings Program Fellows for a program that bridges centuries of musical expression.
The evening opens with Purcell’s Chacony in G minor, a masterful exercise in Baroque elegance, followed by an arrangement of “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas for string quintet, capturing the Baroque opera’s heart-wrenching sorrow. Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1, a deeply personal work reflecting the composer’s early influences and evolving modernist voice, follows with fiery intensity and raw emotion.
After intermission, an all-string arrangement of a passage from Bach’s Goldberg Variations offers a moment of sublime introspection, setting the stage for Arvo Pärt’s meditative Fratres, a work of hypnotic simplicity, in celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday.
The concert culminates with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, performed in a rarely heard version for seven strings. This powerful work, written in the final days of World War II, is a poignant meditation on loss and rebirth.
