Boston’s Radius Ensemble to Perform the Music of Alexandra du Bois

Boston’s Radius Ensemble Perform the music of Alexandra du Bois

From Radius Ensemble:

Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 8 pm
Pickman Hall at the Longy School of Music

CZERNOWIN – fardanceCLOSE for solo piano
DU BOIS – Night Songs for wind quintet
BRAHMS – String Sextet in G major, Op. 36

Radius brings the season to a close with two works by locals in a program of cultural and historical Reverberations. First comes a solo piano work entitled fardanceCLOSE, written by Harvard faculty member Chaya Czernowin in 2012 (and revised in 2020), which explores our perception of decibels and distance. Next, the ensemble performs an excerpt from Night Songs (Nachtliederen), a string quartet (2005) by Longy composition department chair Alexandra du Bois in the composer’s own 2007 arrangement for winds. Originally commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Night Songs is inspired by and dedicated to the life of young Dutch Jewish writer and Holocaust victim, Etty Hillesum. The concert concludes with a Romantic bookend to match the Vaughan Williams Quintet of the first concert: the incomparable String Sextet in G Major, Op. 36 (1864-5) by Johannes Brahms.