JOURNEYS to Open Music of Remembrance's 2026-27 Season

Music of Remembrance (MOR) will open the 2026/27 season with Journeys on Sunday, November 1, 2026, at 3:00pm in Benaroya Hall's Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital 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 texts 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.”

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)

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