Then Is Now
Saturday, September 20, 2025 | 7:30 PM | NEC’s Jordan Hall
🎟️ Tickets available here
Memory doesn’t sit still. It bends, blurs, and blooms — sometimes bringing the past into sharp focus, other times melting it into something dreamlike. A Far Cry’s season premiere, Then Is Now, is an exploration of nostalgia: how music remembers, transforms, and reawakens what was once felt.
The original working title for this program was The Persistence of Memory, inspired by Dalí’s painting of melting clocks. That surreal image of time slipping, warping, and folding into itself resonates deeply with the music we’ll share. Each piece looks backward to move forward, turning recollection into revelation.
Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Caroline Shaw | Punctum
Shaw calls this work “an exercise in nostalgia.” It deconstructs a centuries-old chorale most famously used by Bach, a melody that has resurfaced over time in protest songs and even Paul Simon’s American Tune. Like a photograph with some small detail that pricks the memory, Shaw’s fractured treatment makes us feel how one sound can trigger floods of emotion, collective and personal.
Komitas | Armenian Folk Songs (arr. Aslamazyan)
Komitas devoted his life to collecting and preserving Armenian folk music, cataloguing thousands of songs that otherwise might have been lost to history. These miniatures are touchstones of cultural memory, carrying voices across time. In them, nostalgia is not just personal — it is national, communal, and enduring.
Osvaldo Golijov | Tenebrae
Golijov’s Tenebrae hovers between despair and hope, light and shadow. A significant musical touchstone for our ensemble, the work draws on François Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Ténèbres, Golijov. Golijov composed it in the aftermath of both political violence and a trip to the planetarium with his son, where they “saw the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space.” The music shifts depending on how closely you listen: from a distance, it offers a luminous, almost serene surface, but up close it reveals a depth of pain. Here, nostalgia emerges through a lens of longing and loss.
Benjamin Britten | Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge
Britten transformed a theme by his beloved teacher into a dazzling set of variations, each one refracting its original inspiration through a new lens. At once tribute and invention, this piece is nostalgia made creative — honoring the past while creating something wholly new. It’s also a work close to A Far Cry’s heart: it anchored our Grammy-nominated album Visions and Variations, and we’re thrilled to bring it back to life in this concert.
A Far Cry’s Own Memory
This program doesn’t just reflect on the memory within each composition — it’s also a mirror of A Far Cry’s journey. From our early collaborations with Caroline Shaw, to programming Golijov in our earlier seasons, to recording Britten eight years ago, Then Is Now feels like a homecoming. As we approach our 20th anniversary, this concert reminds us of the value in looking back — carrying the lessons and joys of the past forward into the future.
Join us this Saturday at Jordan Hall as we open Season 19 with music that remembers — and transforms!
