NSO: Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio & Nokuthula Ngwenyama tickets

The Kennedy Center’s beloved Trio-in-Residence welcomes award-winning composer/violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama to premiere her new piano quartet Elegy. This Kennedy Center co-commission was written as a response to the tragic events and social reckoning of 2020. Known for writing “music of bold, mesmerizing character” (Gramophone), Ngwenyama joins “superstars of the chamber music world” (The Washington Post) Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson for a memorable evening to kick off the 2022–2023 Fortas season.

Our trio is honored that the featured composer of this year’s Fortas series wrote a special piano quartet (in which she is featured as a violist) for us. Elegy, a Kennedy Center co-commission, is a heart-wrenching tribute to the victims of racial prejudice and to the struggle for equality and justice. “Thula” is also joining us in one of my favorites, the Dvořák E-flat Piano Quartet, a work that features the viola prominently.

There is something very fitting about having Dvořák’s presence in this program: astonishingly, he was an early champion of American Black composers. And, as the head of the newly established National Music Conservatory in Lower Manhattan, he insisted that it would be open to women and people of color (not a given in the 1880s!)