The 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer returns to Houston with a new work composed for Sarah Rothenberg.

Tyshawn Sorey’s major new piano work, For Julius Eastman, honors the American composer, pianist, vocalist, performance artist and conductor. Sorey and Rothenberg’s deep musical relationship grew out of their work together on the DACAMERA-Rothko Chapel commission of Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), and it was during their performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory that Sorey first conceived of this piece. The intensity and hyper-sensitivity of Sorey’s music corresponds to Rothenberg’s pianism, and this expansive new solo work probes emotional depths and upends our sense of time. Rothenberg opens the program with Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Expressionist miniatures that contain worlds. For this unique event, the Menil Collection’s foyer is transformed into an intimate in-the-round performance space.