@ Buy Tickets! Doors open at 6pm, Concert begins at 6:30 | Advanced Tickets: $30 | Door Tickets: $35 | $15 for students and free for kids under 10 at the door Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night,” 1899) is one of the great emotional experiences in chamber music. Written for string sextet, it follows the arc of a late-Romantic poem: two lovers walking in moonlight, a painful secret revealed, and — through the sheer force of feeling — a transformation. The music doesn’t just describe the story. It is the transfiguration. Richard Strauss was asking a related question forty years later when he composed his final opera, Capriccio — a work entirely consumed by the debate over whether words or music matter more. The string sextet that opens the opera, played onstage before a singer has uttered a syllable, is Strauss’s quiet, gorgeous answer. Both pieces share not just a philosophy but an instrument: the rare and intimate sound of six strings playing as one. Shulamit Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus (2008) brings the question into our own time, invoking the oldest musician in Western mythology — the poet whose playing could stop rivers and soften stone. What does it mean to inherit that tradition? What does music still have the power to do? Program: Richard Strauss, String Sextet from Capriccio, Op. 85 (1939) Shulamit Ran, Lyre of Orpheus (2008) Arnold Schoenberg, Verklarte Nacht (1899) Artists: Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins, Anna Griffis, and Ken Hamao, violas Francesca McNeeley and Joseph Gotoff, celli The Outer Cape Chamber Music Festival at PAAM brings world-class chamber music to Provincetown through an intimate concert series that uniquely integrates with the museum’s visual art exhibitions. Led by cellist Joseph Gotoff, the series features concerts over two weeks in early summer, performed by world-class musicians with ties to Cape Cod. Each concert is specifically curated to converse with the art on display at the museum.
