Letters from Home

Composers Boccherini, Habibi, and Dvořák all share a common experience of leaving their homes to settle somewhere new. Letters from Home features music that focuses on the parallel feelings of the unfamiliar and nostalgia for the comforts of home. In Boccherini’s piece “Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid,” the composer’s efforts were so focused on capturing the sounds and senses of his home of Madrid that he expanded on the traditional uses of string instruments in order to create realistic depictions of the church bells, dancers, soldiers, and singers of his beloved city. Co-commissioned by OSL and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in 2019, Iman Habibi wrote his string quartet “Uproot” as a meditation on leaving his home of Iran and the journey of settling in his new home of Canada. This concert concludes with Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 3 in Eb major. Written near the end of his time living in America, he drew on the musical influences he absorbed in Spillville, Iowa in 1893.