This program begins with a question that has no clean answer: how do we hold opposing truths inside ourselves without one destroying the other? Across four centuries, the composers gathered here refuse easy resolution — their music written at the intersection of loss and transcendence, division and wholeness, the self that performs and the self that hides. What emerges is not a narrative of overcoming, but something more honest: the discovery that contradiction, held with enough artistic will, becomes its own kind of wholeness. These are not pieces about conflict resolved. They are pieces about conflict inhabited — and the strange, sustaining beauty that lives inside that space.

The program culminates with Estrella, a work commissioned from composer Texu Kim. Embedded within it is a melody from Schubert that shaped Byeol’s earliest musical life — carried now across two continents, two languages, and two versions of herself, into something entirely new. It is a piece about where music comes from when it has traveled far enough to forget, and remember, its own origins.

Bach - Chaconne in d minor arr. Busoni

Schumann ‘Carnival of Vienna’ Op. 26

[INTERMISSION]

Chopin - Berceuse

Franck - Prelude, Fugue and Variation Op. 18

Silvestrov - Kitsch musik

Texu Kim - Estrella

⏱︎ 97 minutes with an intermission.