Name: Notes Unspoken
Start: 2025-09-26T19:30:00-05:00
Location: Midtown Arts Theatre Center Houston

Kinetic Ensemble continues its momentum into its second decade as one of Houston’s most exciting chamber ensembles, with thoughtfully curated, innovative, and artistically excellent performances. At the center of this season-opening concert program is Benjamin Britten’s Double Concerto for Violin and Viola (1932), which features Kinetic founder and Artistic Director Natalie Lin Douglas and core violist Sebastian Stefanović as soloists.
Sketched by the 18-year-old Britten, who was already a prolific young composer, the Double Concerto captures the composer’s youthful exuberance and affinity toward spotlighting string virtuosity. At the same time, the work contains passages of surprisingly mature and deep expressivity. Never published in his lifetime, Britten’s meticulously detailed sketch was realized by his longtime assistant, Colin Matthews, and only received its premiere performance in 1997, over 20 years after his death. Kinetic will perform a rare string orchestra arrangement of this work.
Accompanying the Double Concerto will be the premiere of a new string arrangement of Unstrung by Rice graduate Alex Berko, which pays homage to the bluegrass traditions of Kentucky; Michael Torke's December, which evokes the "cozy cheer" the composer felt on his paper route in the early days of Milwaukee winter; and American composer Libby Larsen’s String Symphony (1999), a lush and expansive work that pays homage to strings and explores the notion of an “American English” musical vernacular.
Our vision for this program as a whole is one that captures the inventiveness, virtuosity, and the expressive capability of the string orchestra as a powerful symphonic body.
On the program:
Michael Torke: December (1995)
Benjamin Britten: Double Concerto for Violin and Viola, arr. string orchestra (1932)
Alex Berko: Unstrung, arr. string orchestra (2025 — world premiere)
Libby Larsen: String Symphony (1999)