Notes Unspoken
Friday, September 26, 2025, 7:30pm
MATCH
3400 Main Street, 77002
$35 general admission
$15 student tickets
“Strings, the core of the symphony orchestra…seem to express something deeply felt in the soul, something deeply lyrical about being, simply, alive.”
— composer Libby Larsen
About
Kinetic Ensemble continues its momentum into its second decade as one of Houston’s most exciting chamber ensembles, with thoughtfully curated, innovative, and artistically excellent performances. At the center of this season-opening concert program is Benjamin Britten’s Double Concerto for Violin and Viola (1932), which features Kinetic founder and Artistic Director Natalie Lin Douglas (pictured above center) and core violist Sebastian Stefanović (pictured above right) as soloists.
Sketched by the 18-year-old Britten, who was already a prolific young composer, the Double Concerto captures the composer’s youthful exuberance and affinity toward spotlighting string virtuosity. At the same time, the work contains passages of surprisingly mature and deep expressivity. Never published in his lifetime, Britten’s meticulously detailed sketch was realized by his longtime assistant, Colin Matthews, and only received its premiere performance in 1997, over 20 years after his death. Kinetic will perform a rare string orchestra arrangement of this work.
Accompanying the Double Concerto will be the premiere of a new string arrangement of Unstrung by Rice graduate Alex Berko (pictured above left), which pays homage to the bluegrass traditions of Kentucky; Michael Torke's December, which evokes the "cozy cheer" the composer felt on his paper route in the early days of Milwaukee winter; and American composer Libby Larsen’s String Symphony (1999), a lush and expansive work that pays homage to strings and explores the notion of an “American English” musical vernacular.
Our vision for this program as a whole is one that captures the inventiveness, virtuosity, and the expressive capability of the string orchestra as a powerful symphonic body.
— curated by Natalie Lin Douglas, violinist; Sebastian Stefanović, violist
Program
Michael Torke: December (1995)
Benjamin Britten: Double Concerto for Violin and Viola, arr. string orchestra (1932)
Alex Berko: Unstrung, arr. string orchestra (2025 — world premiere)
Libby Larsen: String Symphony (1999)
Featured Artists
The “stirring” (New York Times), “intoxicating” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and “disarmingly beautiful” (Textura) music of American composer Alex Berko (b. 1995) has been commissioned and performed by the Louisville, Albany, Brooklyn, Monterey, New York Youth, and National Youth Orchestras, The Crossing, Conspirare, National Lutheran Choir, Stare at the Sun, Roots in the Sky, and the Miró and Del Sol String Quartets among many others.
Berko’s choral music is featured on three GRAMMY®-nominated albums for Best Choral Performance: Conspirare’s House of Belonging, The Crossing’s Carols After a Plague and Rising w/ The Crossing. He recently served as composer-in-residence with the Louisville Orchestra as a member of their 2023-2024 Creators Corps.
Libby Larsen (b. 1950, Wilmington, Delaware) is one of America’s most performed living composers. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024), she has composed over 500 works including orchestra, opera, vocal and chamber music, symphonic winds, and band. Her work is widely recorded. An advocate for the music and musicians of our time, in 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composer’s Forum. Grammy Award winner and former holder of the Papamarkou Chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Larsen has also held residencies with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony. From 2014-2020 as, Artistic Director of the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, she guided a faculty of practicing professional artists in nurturing and production of new opera by American Composers. Larsen’s 2017 biography, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life, Denise Von Glahn, author, is available from the University Illinois Press.
New Zealand-born violinist, educator, and arts entrepreneur Natalie Lin Douglas is the founder and artistic director of the Houston-based Kinetic Ensemble, which has been coined “Houston’s indie, conductorless orchestra” (Houston Public Media) and praised for its “visually arresting… brilliantly executed” performances (Arts+Culture Texas). With Kinetic, Natalie has overseen the curation of ten concert seasons, and commissioned and premiered over two dozen works by emerging and established composers of our time. The ensemble’s recordings are featured on albums released by Orchid Classics, Capella Records, Bright Shiny Things, and Centaur Records.
Natalie was a prizewinner at the 2013 Michael Hill International Violin Competition and the 2012 Klein International Strings Competition. A versatile chamber musician, she has toured throughout New Zealand in concerts presented by Chamber Music New Zealand and in the UK with the Scottish Ensemble. She has appeared as a guest artist with NZTrio, and performed alongside such acclaimed artists as Clarice Assad, Iva Bittova, Kyung Sun Lee, Jon Kimura Parker, Miguel Zenón, and Evan Ziporyn.
Natalie is an Associate Professor of Music at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches chamber music and violin, and coordinates and advises for the Emerson/Harris Program for Private Study. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, under the mentorship of Paul Kantor and Karim Al-Zand, and completed her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She lives in Medford, Massachusetts with her husband, architect Tucker Douglas, and their son Ezra.
Michael Torke’s work has been described as "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years" (Gramophone). Hailed as a "vitally inventive composer" (Financial Times) and "a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation" (New York Times), Torke has created a substantial body of works in virtually every genre; his recent piece SKY, written for violinist Tessa Lark, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for a Grammy® award for “best classical instrument solo.”
Torke has been commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey, National Ballet of Canada, Metropolitan Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, English National Opera, London Sinfonietta, Lontano, De Volharding, and the Smith, Ying, and Amstel Quartets, among other orchestras, ballet companies, and ensembles.
Violist Sebastian Stefanović joined The Florida Orchestra in the fall of 2022. He is a Baltimore native and completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Rice University’s Shepherd School while studying with Ivo-Jan van der Werff.
Stefanovic is a passionate advocate for new music and the expansion of the viola repertoire, and he has commissioned, premiered and recorded a variety of solo and ensemble works, including the winning composition of the American Viola Society’s Gardner Prize, as well as participating in the 2025 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.
As a chamber musician, he has received quartet fellowships at the Aspen Music Festival and the Robert Mann String Quartet Seminar. He enjoys inventive and multifaceted programming, frequently curating interdisciplinary collaborations as a core member of Houston-based conductorless string orchestra Kinetic Ensemble, which recently completed a weeklong residency at MIT and debuted a self-titled album at the top of the Billboard Classical charts.
Since moving to Tampa Bay, Stefanovic has helped create and co-teach three years of Community Strings summer programming as TFO’s first community embedded musician. He is also the director of the Pinellas Youth Philharmonic.
When not playing music, Stefanovic enjoys cooking, reading, pickleball, and soccer.