A Clearing — Music in the Garden

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.