Don’t miss the world premiere of Samuel Adams‘ Sundial, a LACO commissioned work for percussion and string quartet featuring Principal Percussion Wade Culbreath. Our final chamber concert of the season also includes Contrapunctus I, Stefano Scodanibbio‘s string quartet arrangement reinvented from Bach‘s The Art of the Fugue, and Dvořák‘s lively Piano Quintet No. 2.

A Note from Samuel Adams about Sundial:

Sundial works exactly like its namesake: the quintet projects a series of musical shadows that reveal the passage of time in the shape of an arc. The music is more autobiographical than conceptual and reflects several important moments in my life, not the least of which being the birth of my first child last year. The almost blinding joy of having him around has been a counterbalance to the bizarre, shadowy last two years. To me, this duality is the essence of the piece: it is at once a rippling shadow as well as a meridian sun.

The string writing is in dialogue with a late Renaissance and Baroque performance practice, eschewing an impassioned, vibrating sound for lightness and clarity—particularly with the two violins, who on occasion rise above the texture to play floating duets that could have been written by a composer living three and a half centuries ago.

The percussion setup is made strictly of metallic sounds: vibraphone, small brass cymbals, and almglocken, tuned cowbells that have a luminous, slightly out-of-tune quality.

During the height of the pandemic, I listened to a tremendous amount of early vocal music whose breathtaking structures are made of the humblest fragments and whose subtle shadings in harmony and texture elicit such depth of feeling. Now that Sundial is finished, and I have a little more perspective, it is clear I was asking myself if I could do the same.

[Effective January 2022, LACO’s vaccine requirement for all eligible audience members includes a COVID-19 booster obtained no later than the date of the performance.

Eligibility for the COVID-19 booster is as follows: for all Moderna recipients and Pfizer recipients ages 12+, boosters are eligible five months after their second vaccine dose. Johnson & Johnson vaccine recipients are eligible for a booster dose two months after their initial vaccine.]

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