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

Anton Webern  —  Langsamer Satz
Ottorino Respighi  —  Il tramonto (for soprano and string quartet)
Ludwig van Beethoven  —  String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135       

***Program and artists subject to change.

Chamber Connexions CCX

Chamber Connexions (CCX) aims to enrich San Antonio's cultural scene through the transformative power of chamber music. CCX presents exceptional concerts featuring world-class musicians, showcasing both traditional masterpieces and exciting new works collaborating with local and international artists. 

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