At Sunset explores music written with an awareness of endings—not necessarily tragic endings, but music shaped by reflection, distance, acceptance, and the passing of time.
The program opens with Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz, an early work filled with warmth and suspended lyricism that captures the feeling of late light before nightfall. Ottorino Respighi’s Il tramonto for soprano and string quartet, based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Sunset”, closes the first half of the program. Part chamber work and part miniature opera, the piece unfolds as a meditation on love, loss, and memory, with the voice emerging directly from within the quartet texture.
The second half is devoted to Beethoven’s final completed string quartet, Op. 135. Written near the end of his life, the work contains many of the qualities associated with Beethoven’s late style: intimacy, transparency, humor, and philosophical questioning. Its final movement, built around the phrase “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”), closes the evening not with grand tragedy, but with clarity and acceptance.
*Program and artists subject to change.
Langsamer Satz
Il tramonto (for soprano and string quartet)
String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135
With spirit and sensitivity, soprano Chelsea Helm brings a versatile voice to the concert stage. An active choral artist, Ms. Helm appears regularly with Seraphic Fire, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, and Conspirare, with whom she was nominated for a GRAMMY® award for Best Choral Album. Last season she was also heard with Kinnara, the Carmel Bach Festival, the American Soloists Ensemble, and Voices of Ascension, and this season she makes ensemble debuts with the Concordia Chamber Players, The Thirteen, and Spire Chamber Ensemble.
As an oratorio soloist, she recently made her international debut performing Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony at the Seoul Arts Center in South Korea. Her latest concert appearances around the United States have included the Brahms Requiem, Haydn’s Theresienmesse and Paukenmesse, the Bach B Minor Mass, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and the Verdi Requiem in a new chamber arrangement.
This year Ms. Helm presented art song recitals in New Mexico, Virginia, and Utah. A Michigan native, she is now based in New York City.
