Textures

Textures explores the layered meanings of “tract” through three powerful and contrasting chamber works. Franz Schubert’s unfinished String Trio in B-flat Major opens the program with a compact, elegant study in musical motion, balancing ascending arpeggios and descending scales in a kind of lyrical pamphlet. Joan Tower’s To Sing or Dance, a newly commissioned piece, evokes the vitality of the natural world through her signature earthy textures and vivid musical imagery. The program closes with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, a searing memorial to his closest friend, unfolding as an expansive emotional landscape marked by grief, stillness, and unrelenting intensity.