CURRENT
Season 33
SOLI opens its season on the road, carrying seven American works up the I-35 corridor. Each is a signal, and everything depends on who receives it. Some cross great distances: the personal stories in Ethan Wickman’s Relics from the Borderland, passed through generations before reaching him; and one familiar tune, sent to three composers in turn, returns as ebullience, as hope, and as the resolution only dissonance can offer a country still striving toward a more perfect union. Others travel no further than a single listener. Edna Alejandra Longoria follows the marigold scent that guides her abuelo’s spirit home; Jessie Montgomery listens to sadness instead of trying to fix it. And each performance highlights a different work by Elliott Miles McKinley, exploring his thirty years of conversation with SOLI’s musicians.
Celebrating ten years of partnership, SOLI and Texas Public Radio make this stage San Antonio’s for an afternoon of contemporary classical music. Anyone can ask for a spot: students, teachers, and people who practice after work and on weekends, playing works written after 1970. TPR carries some of these performances onto Performance Saturday, taking a living room’s worth of preparation all the way to the airwaves. A decade in, the premise holds: new music belongs to everyone!
Link to register will be available on October 5, 2026.
Interiors looks outward from inside. Scott Ordway, SOLI’s Feature Focus composer, wrote his three Interiors alone in a room and ended the set at a window: after us, the birds will sing. Every other work on the program opens a window of its own. Rolando Gómez runs vibrant Cuban son rhythms through a classical quartet, while Munich’s Sophia Jani looks back at a charmed Riviera generation and what became of it. At the center stands Aaron Jay Kernis’s Still Movement with Hymn from 1993, a masterpiece of sustained quiet intensity, and among the most formidable American chamber works of its decade.
Lab Works closes SOLI’s inaugural Composer Lab at Trinity University. Early-career Fellows come to San Antonio from across the country to write for SOLI: four days of readings, rehearsals, and the kind of conversation that changes a score. The faculty includes SOLI’s Feature Focus composer Scott Ordway, San Antonio’s own Ethan Wickman and Edna Longoria, and SOLI’s four musicians, who read the first drafts, stay through every revision, and play the finished works. Every note on this program is a world premiere.
Public Ceremony is Scott Ordway’s electronic alter ego, and First Contact is the first night it shares a stage with SOLI. Ordway plays most of the evening himself at Hopscotch, a room chosen because he wanted this music out of concert halls. The set runs on analog synthesizers, samples, and field recordings, long-form and ritualistic. It ends with the world premiere of a new work written for SOLI and Public Ceremony together. Ordway is SOLI’s Feature Focus composer this season, heard in November writing music you have to lean in for. This is the other half of him, and by his own account the half that came first.
Meet the inaugural SOLI Composer Lab Apprentices. Every piece on this program was written by a San Antonio high school student, and every one is a world premiere, after spending the fall writing for SOLI under the mentorship of Scott Ordway and the Lab faculty. The concert is part of Texas Public Radio’s Classical Connections Live series, so these premieres reach KPAC listeners across the city as well as the audience in the room.
SOLI returns to the Betty Kelso Center at the San Antonio Botanical Garden for an evening co-curated with Feature Focus composer Scott Ordway. The program is built around the Suite from The Clearing and the Forest, a work about shelter, movement, and sanctuary that SOLI commissioned, premiered in 2019, and recorded in 2022. Music by the composers who shaped him fits in and around its sections: Bach’s Second Cello Suite, Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, and David Lang’s Oscar-nominated simple song #3. The original production began in pine boughs and ended in hundreds of oranges, the room turning from evergreen to citrus, so that the journey reached the audience through the nose before the ear.
SOLI throws Steve Reich a ninetieth-birthday party at Trinity University, where SOLI has been the Ensemble in Residence since 2008. Students join the band, side by side, after a semester of coaching from its own players. The evening swings between the crowded and the solitary. Double Sextet, the piece that won Reich his Pulitzer, puts twelve people up there at once; in New York Counterpoint a single clarinet becomes eleven; and Clapping Music asks for many hands and good timing. John Adams and Philip Glass round out the family with Gabriella Smith, born nineteen years after Clapping Music into everything they made.