Lorelei Ensemble
ROTHKO CHAPEL
Featuring Cantus
February 28, 2026
Lorelei Ensemble
Beth Willer, conductor, artistic director
Kathryn Cruz
Dianna Grabowski
Lauren Kelly
Sylvia Leith
Molly Netter
Clara Osowski
Kayleigh Sprouse
Sonja Tengblad
Cantus:
John Paul Rudoi, Tenor
Rod Kelly Hines, Baritone
Paul Scholtz, Tenor
Jeremy Wong, Baritone
Chris Foss, Bass
Samuel Bohlander-Green, Bass
Jacob Christopher, Tenor
Alex Nishibun, Tenor
MKI Artists, 70 S Winooski Ave.
#318, Burlington, VT 05401.
Program order
songs and interludes (2025, world premiere)
Katherine BALCH
Commissioned for Lorelei Ensemble by Susan Reardon, with additional support from Marsha Gray and Linda Heffner
Chad Beebe, percussion
Colors (1973)
Julius EASTMAN
with members of Peabody Conservatory’s NEXT Ensemble:
Caitlin Glastonbury, Lauren Kim, Julie Knott, Charlotte Knutsen, Evelyn Spencer, Elliott Kloninger-Stever
Intermission
Rothko Chapel (1971)
Morton FELDMAN
with guest artists Cantus
Kiarra Saito-Beckman, viola
Chad Beebe, percussion
Jessie Chiang, celeste
Program Notes and Selected Text
songs and interludes
My response to Rothko Chapel pulls from a few disparate sources. The first is Morton Feldman’s ‘Rothko Chapel’. As my title identifies, I have borrowed Feldman’s formal structure of alternating songs with instrumental interludes.
Then there’s the question of Rothko’s art, especially the triptychs in Rothko Chapel itself — massive, a space of patience and bold commitment. I don’t think the “colour” of my music matches their blacks and near-blacks, so I’ve turned to earlier Color Field works as inspiration for musical textures and timbres — the bold complimentary hues of works like Untitled (1955), Yellow and Blue (1955), and the warm, enveloping tones of No. 7 (Green and Maroon) (1953) and Orange (1957).
Rothko and Feldman’s works seem the opposite of what I tend to do: intensely detailed and intricate pieces on the shorter side. I wanted to find a text that could be the bridge.
Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, offered this. I am attracted to it for a lot of reasons, but mainly for its elegance of language and storytelling. I cannot set a one-hundred-something-page essay to song, so I filtered out words, bit by bit. This process, black-out poetry, results in a page of writing that is mostly blacked out with only a word or two visible. It resembles, in my mind, Rothko Chapel’s black triptychs — mostly monochromatic, with textural ripples. My piece sets several of these black-out texts, each corresponding to a chapter in Virginia Woolf’s essay.
I wonder how Woolf, who died of suicide just shy of 30 years prior to Rothko, would have felt sitting in Rothko Chapel, or hearing Feldman’s response. Would they feel a resonance between their works as I do?
—Katherine Balch, 2025
all texts are black-out poetry fragments from Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own, created by the composer.
I. Unsolve
I will try to explain:
I sat down on the banks of the river
and began to wonder what the words might mean,
consider them in that light.
but when I began to consider,
all I could do was
unsolve.
[interlude i]
II. imagine a room
I must ask you to imagine a room,
the strife of the tongue and the confusion of the body
picking up a notebook and pencil.
Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed
animal in the universe?
I should need to be a herd of elephants,
a wildness of spiders,
longest lived and most
multitudinously eyed
to cope with all this
[interlude ii]
III. Draw the curtains
Describe:
A spider’s web still attached at all four corners,
A worm winged like an eagle
A vessel,
A glimpse of heaven
Imagine:
The universe, that refuge of Anonymity,
The act of creation,
The feat of prodigious difficulty,
The world’s notorious indifference.
Let her have:
Time, and
thick gloves on her hands, and bars
to protect her of solid gold,
Incandescent, unimpeded.
IV. Impossible
My hand delights to trace
unusual things,
an itch for scribbling
grown about with weeds and
bound with briars.
It poured itself out,
a microscope to the
frame of a sentence, the
fashioning of a scene, the
extreme activity of the mind
which let flowers fall
upon the tomb of poetry
If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks:
this shape, this moment is not made
end to end
but built
and now lost and,
very likely,
devoured.
[interlude iii]
V. An answer to several questions/the light winding itself up again
An answer to several questions might be:wait.
consider the whole thing more carefully.
the light winding itself up again,
I see
a force in things overlook,
A rhythmical order of
severances and oppositions
And harmony and fusion
perhaps by pausing and looking,
I can
catch a glimpse of the shadow,
shapeless as mist
And then,
give birth to
all kinds of other ideas,
a fountain of
perpetual singing
ROTHKO CHAPEL
The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual environment created by the American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) as a place for contemplation where men and women of all faiths, or of none, may meditate in silence, in solitude or celebration together. For this chapel, built in 1971 by the Ménil Foundation in Houston, Texas, Rothko painted fourteen large canvasses.
While I was in Houston for the opening ceremonies of the Rothko Chapel, my friends John and Dominique de Ménil asked me to write a composition as a tribute to Rothko to be performed in the chapel the following year.
To a large degree, my choice of instruments (in terms of forces used, balance and timbre) was affected by the space of the chapel as well as the paintings. Rothko's imagery goes right to the edge of his canvas, and I wanted the same effect with the music - that it should permeate the whole octagonal-shaped room and not be heard from a certain distance. The result is very much what you have in a recording - the sound is closer, more physically with you than in a concert hall.
The total rhythm of the paintings as Rothko arranged them created an unbroken continuity. While it was possible with the paintings to reiterate color and scale and still retain dramatic interest, I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples.
These sections could be characterized as follows: 1. a longish declamatory opening; 2. a more stationary "abstract" section for chorus and chimes; 3. motivic interlude for soprano, viola and tympani; 4. a lyric ending for viola with vibraphone accompaniment, later joined by the chorus in a collage effect.
There are a few personal references in Rothko Chapel. The soprano melody, for example, was written on the day of Stravinsky's funeral service in New York. The quasi-Hebraic melody played by the viola at the end was written when I was fifteen. Certain intervals throughout the work have the ring of the synagogue.
There were other references which I have now forgotten.
--Morton Feldman