After a yearlong postponement, the barrier-breaking, repertoire-expanding wind ensemble Imani Winds will return to Durham. This fall’s offering, Revolutionary aka The Civil Rights Project, thematically organizes several commissions from the past dozen years around the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Following an arrangement of Sam Cooke’s plaintive and pointed “A Change is Gonna Come,” we hear Frederic Rzewski’s “Sometimes,” commissioned by and premiered at Duke Performances in 2015 in celebration of the legacy of historian John Hope Franklin. Vijay Iyer’s “Bruits,” composed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 killing, features pianist Cory Smythe and treats “the murderous consequences of the stand your ground law,” while Jason Moran’s “Cane” — a reference to his ancestral home near the Cane River in Louisiana — explores the impact of slavery within his family history. The evening rounds out with Imani co-founder Valerie Coleman’s “Bronzeville,” an invocation of three poems by Chicago literary legend Gwendolyn Brooks.

Self-taught pianist by three, professional musician by fifteen, teacher to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis soon thereafter, and later Duke’s first Artist in Residence and Director of the Duke Jazz Ensemble, Mary Lou Williams’s 20th-century artistic scope was stratospheric. In 1945, she turned toward the stars with the landmark Zodiac Suite, a constellation of jazz tone poems inspired by the astrological signs of her musical contemporaries. Their boundary-breaking, stylistic intertwining — tilting from blues to early swing to jagged jazz harmony — caught the ear of GRAMMY-nominated pianist Chris Pattishall, a fellow musical wunderkind, rising star in the New York jazz scene, and Durham native. Pattishall spent over a decade with Williams’s compositions, expanding and exploding their instrumentation into a full-bodied interpretive album, Zodiac. This world premiere performance, enlivened by sound design from experimental musician and composer Rafiq Bhatia and video projections by artist Kim Alpert, will bring Williams’s work home to Duke and Durham in an unprecedented way.

After a year of virtual offerings, Duke’s resident Ciompi Quartet returns in-person this November with an evening program featuring compositions created during the World War II period. Ciompi will be joined by students from the Duke Chamber Music Program.

The program opens with Irish-English composer Maconchy’s 1942 String Quartet #4, an economical set of movements representative of her melodic and expressive style that gestures toward Maconchy’s Celtic roots. Completed the same year, Prokofiev’s String Quartet #2 in F Minor coalesced while the composer was living in the North Caucasus, displaced by the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The evening closes with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings, written during the waning months of WWII and widely regarded as an elegy for Germany’s destruction during the war. (Strauss’s annotation “IN MEMORIAM” follows his concluding quotation from the first four bars of the Eroica’s Marcia Funebre.) The work, which builds from a set of small melodic ideas that traverse the emotional spectrum from despair to hope, mobilizes, as Juergen May writes, “all of the rhetorical means developed over the centuries to express pain.”

Duke Performances presents Iranian traditional musician Kayhan Kalhor. 

“Music-making of the highest order,” wrote The Guardian of the three Schumann brothers and violist Liisa Randalu, who together make up the Schumann Quartet. After training with the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne, the close-knit ensemble entered the classical music scene in 2007 with fanfare and have received numerous accolades since, including  the Newcomer Award at the 2016 BBC Music Magazine Awards. They pick up the baton from the Belcea Quartet in this Chamber Arts Series, playing the second of Brahms’ op. 51, a more expansive, lyrical piece than the first that also pays homage to Bach with contrapuntal textures throughout. Also on the program is Beethoven’s elegant Quartet No. 5 in A Major, op. 18, modeled directly on Mozart’s quartet in the same key, and Ravel’s first and only string quartet, which was written when the composer was completing his studies at Paris Conservatory, repeatedly striving — and failing — to win first place at the Prix de Rome.

The first piano duo in history to receive Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, Christina and Michelle Naughton are stellar orchestral soloists and “master-pianists” (Gramophone), who “have to be heard to be believed” (Washington Post). The pair return to Duke Performances with some of the most dynamic and challenging works in the repertoire, all of which were initially written for other forces: Grieg added the additional second piano part to Mozart’s Sonata No. 16, while Ravel himself transcribed his own orchestral work — originally conceived as a ballet — into a two-piano reduction. When Beethoven refused to translate Große Fuge into a four-hand piano arrangement, the publisher called upon Anton Haim to complete the task. Intensely disliking the transcription, Beethoven then drafted his own fiendishly difficult arrangement, which the Naughton sisters tackle in this concert.

“For four decades,” Odissi dance master Bijayini Satpathy writes, “the Odissi I have known and owned has been someone else’s song, someone else’s making, someone else’s idea, someone else’s feelings and emotions.” Hailed by The New Yorker as “a performer of exquisite grace and technique,” Satpathy spent 25 years as Principal Dancer with India’s famed Nrityagram Dance Ensemble before striking out on her own to create this singular solo work that radically integrates Odissi’s pasts and proposes its possible futures. This December, Durham audiences will be the first to see the result: ABHIPSAA — a seeking, co-commissioned by Duke Performances and New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center. Satpathy boldly explores her solo voice, advancing the vocabulary of Indian classical dance; ABHIPSAA — a seeking pairs Satpathy’s mesmerizing and rigorous choreography with a new musical score.

Having initially cut their teeth as six choral scholars at Cambridge’s King’s College in 1968, the King’s Singers have undergone many iterations and personnel changes, all the while maintaining the gold standard in a cappella singing and developing their signature close-harmony style. They’ve also long ripped up the rulebook, bringing together songs both ancient and contemporary, classical and popular, sacred and secular. “The famed King’s Singers’ attention to pin-point pitching, slick ensemble, and deft balances between the voices are present in abundance”, heralded BBC Music Magazine. Their return to Duke Performances is accompanied by a program as wide-ranging as you would expect, from traditional plainchant to the 1940s Mel Tormé classic, instantly recognizable by its opening line: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” As is King’s Singers’ tradition, the evening will wrap up with an assortment of new surprises and festive favorites. 

Inserting jokes into their music is a time-honored tradition for composers, but few did so with the impudence of Charles Ives, who once went so far as to title a movement of his Piano Trio “This Scherzo Is A Joke” (nicknamed “TSIAJ”), distorting popular songs from his schoolboy days at Yale. And who better than the new — but already esteemed — Junction Trio, known for their audacious programming pattern of pairing the new and the creative with the familiar and the cherished, to bring Ives’ trio to life. The ensemble, comprising violinist Stefan Jaciw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao, also explores the prickly, hair-raising soundscape of John Zorn’s 2015 composition Ghosts, loosely inspired by the specter of Beethoven’s own Ghost trio.  They round out their debut appearance at Duke Performances with Brahms’ youthful Piano Trio No. 1, op. 8, one of the most well-loved works of the entire piano trio repertoire.

Named after the poet T.S. Eliot, the globe-trotting Eliot Quartett occupies the slot in the CAS series that is reserved each year for one of the world’s brightest up-and-coming string quartets.   Recognized internationally for their interpretations of Mozart’s music, they received second prize at the cutthroat Mozart International Competition in Salzburg in 2018. Here, they open with Mozart’s posthumously published String Quartet No. 21 in D Major, K. 575, the first of the quartets commissioned by the King of Prussia. Nicknamed “The Violet,” this quartet prominently features the cello, a nod to its patron and his skill with the instrument. The Eliot then pivots to Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, op. 92 and its delightfully folkish tunes and textures before concluding with Franck’s cyclic String Quartet in D Major, in commemoration of the composer’s 200th birthday.

T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is considered by many to be the finest poem in the English language.  Published as four separate poems, Eliot always intended to combine them into a single work. Inspired by what Beethoven accomplished in his late quartets, Eliot wished “to do in poetry what Beethoven had done in music.” George Gopen, an Eliot scholar at Duke and the longtime Director of the Chamber Arts Society of Durham, will present a reading of the poem alongside his own music, written to directly echo major moments of musicality in his reading. In the first half of the program, the Eliot Quartett, who named themselves after the poet, will perform a late work of Beethoven. This will be the world premiere of this unique performance of Eliot’s latest and greatest poem.

Violinist Jennifer Frautschi joins forces with the Manasse/Nakamatsu Duo for a devilish program of thrilling virtuosity and expressive freedom. They will perform for us in a variety of combinations: Two-time GRAMMY nominee Frautschi opens the program with Ysaÿe’s Sonata for solo Violin in d minor, a sonata originally dedicated to George Enescu. Pianist Jon Nakamatsu, gold medalist in both the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as well as the United States National Chopin Piano Competition, delivers Chopin’s transformative Fantaisie in F Minor; Jon Manasse, one of this generation’s most celebrated clarinetists, joins him for Weber’s Grand Duo Concertante for clarinet and piano. Frautschi and Nakamatsu will dance through Ravel’s Tzigane, an exhilarating work tinged with exoticized melodies and harmonies, and all three musicians apply their impeccable skill to Bartok’s Contrasts. 

For Quatuor Danel, now celebrating thirty years together, Russian music is a distinct specialty and point of pride. The quartet was the first, for example, to record all 17 of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s stunning string quartets,  single-handedly leading the revival of this Polish Jewish composer’s music, long silenced due to its “degenerate” designation by the Nazi regime. Quatuor Danel’s all-Russian program includes Weinberg’s spirited Quartet No. 9 in F-sharp Minor, op. 80,  as well as the North American premiere of Lera Auerbach’s 2011 Quartet No. 5, “Songs of Alkonost.” They wrap with Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 3 in E-flat Minor, op. 30, his final quartet and a poignant tribute to Ferdinand Laub, whom Tchaikovsky called “the best violinist of our time.” Quatuor Danel’s skill with this repertoire launched them onto the international stage three decades ago; their explosive power and experienced interpretations are not to be missed.