Oregon Mozart Players (OMP) present After and Before, a program that reflects on cycles of change – personal, political, and musical – and the charged moments when one era gives way to another. Led by Artistic Director David Amado, the concert traces how composers look backward in order to move forward, reframing history as a living, unstable presence rather than a fixed past.

The evening opens with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet perform Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 77, No. 2. Shaw was struck by the minuet’s sudden, spare shift into a D-flat major trio – a moment of quiet dislocation within a familiar Classical form. Entr’acte mirrors the structure of a minuet and trio, but gently destabilizes it, pushing the form “to the other side of Alice’s looking glass.” As Shaw writes, “I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”

From there, the program turns to Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, first premiered in Paris in 1920 in a ballet produced by Sergei Diaghilev, with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso. Drawing on music then attributed to Pergolesi, Pulcinella marked a decisive turning point in Stravinsky’s career and launched his Neo-classical period. The work reframes the past with wit, clarity, and biting irony – not as nostalgia, but as transformation.

The concert concludes with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, a restless and stormy masterpiece suspended between Classical balance and Romantic urgency. Driven by tension and unease, the symphony stands as one of Mozart’s most dramatic works – music written on the edge of change, looking both backward and forward at once.

Program

Caroline Shaw – Entr’acte

Igor Stravinsky – Pulcinella Suite

W. A. Mozart – Symphony No. 40