The Strangers’ Case
presented in partnership with Musiqa
Saturday, March 28, 2026, 7:30pm
MATCH
3400 Main Street, 77002
Pay-what-you-can general admission
The Strangers’ Case aims to make a case of its own: though our commitment to immigrants and refugees has been equivocal, nonetheless their success forms the basis of American strength and renewal.
— Composer Karim Al-Zand
About
We are thrilled to partner with Musiqa to present the world premiere of Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand’s (pictured above left) The Strangers’ Case. The GRAMMY® award-winning, Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman (pictured above right) joins the ensemble for this song cycle for tenor and string orchestra that gathers poems and other turn-of-the-century accounts by immigrants to the United States, and situates them among texts from canonically venerated authors including Shakespeare and Dickinson.
“Lady in the Harbor” is the story of a young Polish girl destined for the textile sweatshops, and “Such an Illumination” comes from a Syrian refugee fleeing persecution in his homeland. “Island of Angels” excerpts lines written in the wake of the 1882 Asian Exclusion Act. This anonymous poem, translated from Chinese, was found inscribed on the walls of a San Francisco Bay immigrant detention facility.
The Strangers’ Case will be preceded by the incidental music to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Musagète, which he wrote contemporaneously with many of Al-Zand’s texts. Both the composer and his longtime collaborator, choreographer George Balanchine, have cited Apollon as a turning point in their careers: the pair themselves later immigrated to the United States, where their professional partnership continued to flourish.
In Al-Zand’s words, “The Strangers’ Case aims to remind us of our shared history, fraught as it is with contradiction, filled with both selfless generosity and selfish indifference. By using text materials that span diverse nationalities, stories, voices and historical periods, The Strangers’ Case aims to make a case of its own: though our commitment to immigrants and refugees has been equivocal, nonetheless their success forms the basis of American strength and renewal. As the child of an immigrant, I believe this sort of consciousness-raising is the only way forward. And as an artist, I believe that music is an ideal spark to kindle the altruism in our better natures.”
— curated by Karim Al-Zand, composer; Austin Lewellen, double bassist
Program
Igor Stravinsky: Apollon Musagète (1928)
Prologue: The Birth of Apollo
Variation of Apollo
Pas d'action (Apollo and the Three Muses)
Variation of Calliope (the Alexandrine)
Variation of Polyhymnia
Variation of Terpsichore
Second Variation of Apollo
Pas de deux
Coda
Apotheosis
Karim Al-Zand: The Strangers’ Case (2024 — world premiere)
The Lady in the Harbor (text: Sadie Frowne, 1906; anonymous, 1906)
Who Can Pity My Loneliness? (text: anonymous, ca. 1920)
Whither Would You Go? (text: William Shakespeare, 1601)
The Stranger Within My Gate (text: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1895; Rudyard Kipling, 1912)
They Came From Terror and Tumult (text: Jaime Torres Bodet, 1950)
Exile (text: Harold Hart Crane, 1926)
When Dawn Comes to the City (text: Claude McKay, 1920)
The Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, A.D. 2900 (text: Arthur Wheelock Upson, 1908)
These Strangers (text: Emily Dickinson, 1890)
Featured Artists
Composer Karim Al-Zand’s (b.1970) music is acclaimed for its expressive power and imaginative spirit, described by the Boston Globe as “strong and startlingly lovely.” His works have been performed across North American and internationally, earning him such distinctions as the Arts and Letter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2024 Barlow Prize. A prolific and versatile composer, Al-Zand has created a catalogue of works spanning orchestra, opera, chamber, vocal and solo repertoire. His music embraces a variety of interests, issues and influences. It explores connections between sound and other art forms, drawing inspiration from graphic art, myths and fables, folk music of the world, film, poetry, jazz, and his own Middle Eastern heritage. From compositions for young audiences to scores for dances to interdisciplinary projects, Al-Zand’s music resonates with a wide range of listeners and collaborators.
Alongside his creative work, Al-Zand is a founding and artistic director of Musiqa, Houston’s leading contemporary music ensemble, where he helps shape programming of 21st century repertoire. In his scholarly work, he has pursued several diverse areas of music theory, including topics in jazz, counterpoint, and improvisation (both jazz and 18th century extemporization). Al-Zand was born in Tunis, Tunisia, to an Iraqi father and an American mother. He was raised in Ottawa, Canada and educated in Montreal (McGill University, BMus 1993) and Cambridge (Harvard University, PhD 2000). Since 2000 he has taught composition and music theory in Houston at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University.
Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, praised for his “lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma” (BBC Music Magazine). The 2019 Best Classical Solo Vocal GRAMMY® Award winner, he continues to earn acclaim for his original and innovative programming and recording projects, while regularly performing on the world’s stages in opera, orchestral concerts, recital and chamber music.
Recently Mr. Sulayman was presented by Carnegie Hall for a sold out solo recital debut followed immediately by the world premiere of his own multidisciplinary production, Unholy Wars, a baroque pasticcio centered around the Crusades and the Middle East, at Spoleto Festival USA. He’s also made recent debuts at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Stockholm’s Drottningholms Slottsteater, Houston Grand Opera, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and the Chicago, National and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras. He debuted at Wigmore Hall in concerts of French chamber music with his frequent collaborators, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, which The Arts Desk named to its “Best Performances of 2022.”
A dedicated chamber musician, Sulayman was a frequent participant at the Marlboro Music Festival in collaboration with co-directors and pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. He has since been presented by many of the world’s leading chamber music festivals, collaborating frequently with groups like Eighth Blackbird and as a core member of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. His concerts and recordings have been broadcast nationally and internationally on NPR, American Public Media, BBC Radio 3 and WDR 3.
Karim is passionate about his place in the Arts industry as someone who challenges audiences to think outside the box in a quest to maintain classical music’s relevance in a modern world, smashing the practice of treating old works as museum pieces. He enjoys educating the next generation of music students, encouraging them to think in this way while helping them cultivate their own unique voices. He hopes to make positive changes through thoughtful performance, arts advocacy and social justice that will impact generations to come.