From the quiet moments before dawn to music shaped by memory and mourning, Darkness explores the places where shadow and light meet.

Camille Pépin — Avant les clartés de l’aurore (2020)

French composer Camille Pépin opens the program with Avant les clartés de l’aurore, or Before the Dawn’s Light. Inspired by the shifting colors and atmosphere of the hours just before sunrise, the work moves through darkness toward illumination, creating a vivid and cinematic opening to the concert.

Maurice Ravel — Le Tombeau de Couperin

Written during World War I, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin looks backward while remaining unmistakably his own. Each movement honors a friend of the composer who died during the war, yet rather than dwelling entirely in grief, Ravel fills the music with elegance, warmth, color, and movement.

Joseph Haydn — Symphony No. 44 in E minor, Hob. I:44, “Trauer”

Haydn’s Symphony No. 44, nicknamed Trauer (“Mourning”), brings the program to a dramatic close. Written during Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period, the symphony pairs restless energy and striking contrasts with an especially poignant slow movement, music Haydn reportedly wished to have played at his own funeral.