How does art translate from one medium to another? How do we account for our varied and personal responses to art? This program, bringing together the music of Franz Schubert and contemporary composers Lembit Beecher, Hannah Kendall, and Paul Wiancko, explores these questions. The first half of the program opens and closes with new works written for the Aizuri Quartet by Lembit Beecher and Paul Wiancko. Created in response to the visual art of Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam respectively, these works are recent commissions by the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Composer Hannah Kendall’s Glances / I Don’t Belong Here is “a collection of seven miniatures inspired by the British-Guyanese artist Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes, a series of photographs in which her Black British subjects are posed in the Lake District, the epitome of rural Britain; exploring the notion of alienation and ‘otherness’ in such spaces.” These compelling new works are juxtaposed with two art songs by Franz Schubert, An Die Musik and Nacht und Träume arranged by violinist of the PubliQuartet, Jannina Norpoth. In new arrangements created for the Aizuri Quartet, they allow the listener a moment to reflect and to pause, to consider Schubert’s ode to art and the dream world where ambiguities reside.

The second half of the program returns us to the 19th Century with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, which features two levels of translation: Matthias Claudius’s poem (“Der Tod und das Mädchen”) inspired the composer’s lied of the same name (composed in 1817), which in turn formed the basis for the second movement of his beloved string quartet. Written in the throes of a serious illness, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden transforms a short poem into an epic, deeply felt contemplation on life and death.

–Note by Karen Ouzounian