DSE Presents 2022-2023 Season

Our dazzling season opens on Tuesday, September 20, 2022. Please join us for our 4-concert series, attending in-person at Trinity Center for Urban Life in Philadelphia, or virtually receiving the concerts on video three weeks afterwards to view on-demand.

Subscribe here for a 10% discount on all four concerts, plus a bonus track!

Please join us for our season opening concert on Tuesday, September 20, 2022 at 7:00pm at Trinity Center for Urban Life: DSE Presents “Seasons and Signs for the Days and the Years.”

The program brings together two of our great commissioned works, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran’s Moon Songs: A Song Cycle for Soprano, Flute/Piccolo, Cello, and Piano and Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour’s Remembering Neda for Flute, Cello, and Piano. We will perform George Crumb’s iconic Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) as a tribute to the pioneering composer and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award, who passed away this year. Crumb was a friend, mentor, guest composer, and member of DSE’s Board of Artistic Advisors. 

The performers are our acclaimed flagship ensemble, Dolce Suono Trio, with our Founding Artistic Director Mimi Stillman, flute, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Charles Abramovic, piano, three Curtis Institute of Music graduates who are celebrated soloists and chamber musicians. Joining them in the Ran is soprano Ashley Marie Robillard, a fellow Curtis graduate and member of the Merola Program who has sung with Santa Fe Opera and Opera Philadelphia. 

The program is extraordinarily theatrical: 

George Crumb was inspired by the sounds of the humpbacked whale in his work, and calls for the flutist, cellist, and pianist to be masked, electronically amplified, and play in a space with blue lighting. He evokes geological eras in this powerful work, with an environmentalist message.

Richard Danielpour explores his Persian-Jewish heritage in Remembering Neda, composed in the summer of 2009 while the people of Iran were demonstrating for their freedom from the oppressive Iranian regime. A young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, was murdered by government forces, and her death on the streets of Tehran was captured in a video that went viral. He dedicates Remembering Neda “to the women of Iran, that their voices may be heard.”

DSE commissioned Shulamit Ran to write Moon Songs for our Mahler 100 / Schoenberg 60 project celebrating the anniversaries of the two masters. Her work is a reflection on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, one of the most influential pieces of chamber music and 20th-century music. In this dramatic song cycle, Ran sets diverse texts about the moon from the Bible, medieval Hebrew poets, Renaissance English poets, and modern English and Israeli poets. The title of the concert is taken from a line by Shlomo Ibn Gvirol which Ran includes in her work.