Music of Remembrance Opens 2026/27 Season with Journeys
Music of Remembrance Opens 2026/27 Season with Journeys
Concert honors Steve Reich’s 90th birthday with Different Trains and presents the West Coast premiere of selections from We Go On, Oswego
Seattle • Benaroya Hall
November 1, 2026
SEATTLE, WA – September 23, 2026 – Music of Remembrance (MOR)) will open the 2026/27 season with Journeys on Sunday, November 1, 2026, at 3:00pm at Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall. The concert brings together musical works addressing migration, exile, and the search for safety across time.
“Though the stories in Journeys come from different generations, they speak powerfully to a world still confronting displacement, persecution, and the search for refuge,” said Mina Miller, MOR’s founder and artistic director. “Journeys asks us to look beyond the headlines and listen to individual testimonies – spoken, sung, recorded, and remembered. This music illuminates and honors voices that history nearly left unheard.”
The concert marks the return of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, 25 years after the organization first performed the work with the famously minimalist composer then engineering the sound board from the audience. Violinist Mikhail Shmidt and violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, who took part in that performance, return for the 2026 concert. They will be joined by violinist Elisa Barston and cellist Walter Gray, a founding member of the Kronos Quartet, for which the work was commissioned.
Composed in 1988 for string quartet and tape, Different Trains incorporates interviews, Holocaust survivor testimony, period train sounds, and three pre-recorded string quartets. Experiences aboard the trains transporting Jews to death camps during World War II are contrasted with Reich’s childhood train journeys between divorced parents in New York and California during the same period.
“While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains,” said Reich, who turns 90 next month. “I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.”
Journeys will also include the West Coast premiere of three selections from We Go On, Oswego, performed by mezzo-soprano Lily Bogas. The 2025 theatrical song cycle was inspired by accounts of refugees at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Center in Oswego, New York. Established by the Roosevelt administration in 1944, the center sheltered roughly 1,000 European refugees, most of them Jewish, who fled Nazi persecution across 18 countries.
The three songs – by composers John Musto, Lori Laitman, and Michael Rice, with text by Mark Campbell and Caitlin Vincent – address learning a new language, the federal government’s limited refugee policy, and a young girl’s efforts to adapt to American life.
“We are giving a platform to stories of people who have not had enough space in the historical imagination,” said Nazareth University professor Katie Hannigan, who originally conceived and commissioned the song cycle.
The program also includes Stormy Seas by Iranian American composer Sahba Aminikia. Commissioned by MOR, the work is based on the true stories of five child refugees who crossed dangerous waters in search of safety. Youth narrators and singers participate in the multimedia performance as children fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, communist Cuba, and an orphanage in the Ivory Coast.
The concert opens with the “Molto adagio” movement from the pioneering Black American composer George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1. In 1946, he dedicated this elegiac movement to the memory of his recently deceased grandmother, who had escaped slavery on her own perilous journey. Walker went on to become the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Together, these four works place historical and contemporary experiences of forced migration in direct relation, focusing on people whose lives are often reduced to statistics – or left out of historical accounts entirely.
“This concert calls on us to listen across time and borders, across generations and different worlds,” said Miller. “These stories remind us how profoundly people’s lives depend on the actions of others. I hope they inspire audiences to take action to help make courageous journeys possible today.”
Journeys
Sunday, November 1, 2026 @ 3:00pm
Different Trains by Steve Reich
in honor of the composer's 90th birthday
Selections from We Go On, Oswego
West Coast Premiere
with Lily Bogas, mezzo-soprano
plus “Molto adagio” (String Quartet No. 1) by George Walker
and Stormy Seas by Sahba Aminikia
MOR Chamber Ensemble: Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Elisa Barston, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Walter Gray, cello; Cristina Valdes, piano
Benaroya Hall (200 University Street)
Seattle, Washington
Tickets $60; Students $25 (ID required)
https://musicofremembrance.org/show-details/journeys
About Music of Remembrance
Established in 1998, Music of Remembrance (MOR) pays tribute to historic memory and directly confronts challenges to human rights and dignity today. In addition to its work discovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR is admired around the world for its leadership in commissioning, having premiered 50 new works by leading composers as of its 2025/26 season. These include works for varied chamber ensembles, song cycles, choral works, dance music, film scores, musical dramas, and full-length operas – all using art to examine compelling issues in today’s world. MOR’s nine albums, three documentary films, and extensive outreach programs extend that impact well beyond the concert hall.
Press Contact: Beth Stewart
Verismo Communications
Email:beth@verismopr.com
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