Nicholas Phan, Tai Murray, Karen Ouzounian and Myra Huang at PCMS
Fri, Feb 26 2027
7:30 pm
American Philosophical Society104 S 5th St.Philadelphia, PA 19106
A Year to the Day at PCMS alongside music by Ives, Strozzi, and Shostakovich, performed by Nicholas Phan, Tai Murray, Karen Ouzounian, and Myra Huang.
Music of Memory | Music of Life
This program explores the way that music accompanies us throughout our lives, connecting us to our earliest and most essential memories. From the ecstatic sorrow of Barbara Strozzi’s songs to Charles Ives’s tender evocations of memory, from the vivid energy of Shostakovich’s youthful Piano Trio Nr. 1 to Lembit Beecher’s warmly poignant cycle “A Year to the Day,” the music on this program is bound together by an almost euphoric sense of the wonder of life, tracing an arc from the energy and passion of youth to the thoughtful reflection of age.
Opening the program is an alternating set of Charles Ives and Barbara Strozzi songs (the later arranged for tenor and piano trio) which reflect on the passage of time, memory, and love with drama and an otherworldly sense of sound. Completing the first half is Shostakovich’s lyrically romantic Piano Trio No. 1, full of vivid energy and abrupt shifts of mood, characteristics that would transform into something much darker in his later works. The second half of the program features Lembit Beecher’s song cycle for tenor and piano trio “A Year to the Day,” a piece, much like Ives’s songs, imbued with the music of childhood memories. Thoughtful and tender, with bold flashes of virtuosity, “A Year to the Day” culminates in a joyously buoyant finale.