APERIO, Music of the Americas
PRESENTS
RESONANT DARKNESS - Shadows, Light, & Transcendence in American Music

APERIO, Music of the Americas kicks off its 2024-2025 concert season at MATCH with Resonant Darkness - Shadows, Light & Transcendence in American Music, a program of chamber music showcasing works by Amy Beach, Aaron Copland, Erich Korngold, and Osvaldo Golijov. Examining multiple themes that connect these four composers across American musical history, the program chronicles the sublimation of American Romantic ideals into the intimately personal and expressive language of our times. 

Amy Beach’s epic Piano Quintet is a sensual testament to the grand romantic style in which the composer beautifully unites timbral color with mercurial chromaticism, cyclical thematic structure, and balanced form. In the work, Beach pays sincere homage to the music of Brahms, Liszt, and other beloved musical romantics of her era, while establishing her place as their equal in American music history. 

In a similar Romantic vein, the music of Viennese-American composer Erich Korngold expounds a decadently rich harmonic language descending from the orchestral styles of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. His soprano aria Marietta’s Lied from the opera Die tote Stadt reveals his genius for balancing long-spun and hovering lyrical melodies over a richly imbued accompaniment, here arranged for voice, strings, and piano.

The program also features works by Aaron Copland and Osvaldo Golijov, both of whom create profoundly intimate musical settings of poetry by Emily Dickinson. Copland’s modernist art song approach creates a vivid expression of the poet’s inner world of tumult and yearning through the use of sparse textures and ringing intervals. Golijov, however, mitigates the divide between modernist and romantic sensibilities. His setting of How Slow The Wind for soprano and string quartet is cast as an evocative response - powerful and roiled with anguish - to the sudden death of his close friend Mariel Sturbin. This work contrasts with the stillness and quiet radiance of Lúa Descolorida with poetry by Roasila de Castro. Both of these pieces for soprano and strings are rounded out by the composer's meditative quartet Tenebrae.

This program marks the beginning of Aperio’s 19th concert season in Houston, which would not be possible without the support of the Amphion Foundation, the Brown Foundation, Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

PROGRAM

BEACH - Piano Quintet in F-Sharp minor, Op. 67
COPLAND - Poems of Emily Dickinson (selections) for soprano and piano
KORNGOLD, arr. Forsberg - Marietta’s Lied for soprano and piano quintet
GOLIJOV - Tenebrae; How Slow The Wind; Lua Descolorida for string quartet and soprano

TICKETS
$35 General Admission / $25 Seniors / $15 Students