THE 2023-2024 SEASON
This season and its final concert take their title from Walt Whitman’s poem Reconciliation, featured in Jeffrey Van’s A Procession Winding Around Me, which we will perform in May. This season, we highlight the theme of awe and I can think of few things so wonder-inspiring as the sky.
Awe is what we feel when our minds cannot make sense of what we experience. We may feel it when we observe the night sky or a glaciated mountain range, when we admire extraordinary courage or generosity, and when we sit at a loved one’s side as life enters or departs the world.
This experience of wonder may connect us to the cosmos or to the community around us and compels us to shed ego and reach for an unnamable truth.
This season – our twelfth – serves as an exploration of this feeling of awe in song. It concludes with a study on the awe of moral beauty, featuring a World Premiere by the Leonard Bernstein Award-winning composer Hilary Purrington, Francis Poulenc’s Figure Humaine, and Jeffrey Van’s A Procession Winding Around Me. Monteverdi’s The ‘Lost’ Vespers of 1650 and our performances of Bach’s B Minor Mass allow us to marvel at the inspired handiwork of these two master composers. In between we find wonder in the sky and in a cradle. In each of our concerts this season, I am, above all, seeking to share this experience of awe with you as a way of building community.
I hope that you will continue to believe in the art that The Thirteen creates by subscribing to our 2023-2024 season today. For the first time this year, due to increased demand, we are offering Preferred Seating options for our patrons; I invite you to take advantage of this opportunity. I encourage you to subscribe rather than rely on individual tickets so that you can attend each and every one of our performances. We will also continue to offer each of our programs virtually on demand. Finally, I invite you to go one step beyond subscribing and to consider sustaining the art we make with a donation to The Thirteen.
I look forward to seeing you and your friends at our concerts this season!
Matthew Robertson
Artistic Director
