Excelsa String Quartet
Thomas Adès' Arcadiana evokes images of idyll and conveys "a here that is gone, or is going." Excelsa contrasts Adès' mystical work with Mozart's String Quartet No. 16 in E-flat Major, which is one of six quartets that the composer dedicated to Haydn.
The program concludes with Steve Reich's Different Trains, which uses recording samples of train sounds and speech to juxtapose the composer's memories of being a Jewish child in 1940s America, with the memories of child-survivors of the Holocaust.