IMAGINE: What We Carry invites listeners into a quieter kind of orchestral experience, one shaped by reflection, memory, and shared presence. Curated by Maestro Henry Cheng, this companion playlist was created to live alongside the January concert, offering space for stillness beyond the stage. Together, the music and playlist explore what we hold onto, how we move through it, and why listening can matter just as much as resolution.
The Playlist
- Armand Amar — Desert Dawn
- Henryk Górecki — Symphony No. 3: I. Lento — Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
- Ryuichi Sakamoto — Andata
- John Tavener — The Lamb
- Sofia Gubaidulina — Silenzio
- Nils Frahm — Says
- Hildegard von Bingen — O vis aeternitatis
- Brian Eno — An Ending (Ascent)
- Kaija Saariaho — Du cristal… à la fumée (excerpt)
- György Ligeti — Lux Aeterna
Click here to listen to the Spotify playlist!
A Message from the Maestro – IMAGINE: What We Carry
January is not a month for spectacle.
It’s a month when the noise settles, when the body remembers what the mind tried to outrun, when we realize we are still carrying things from last year — and sometimes from much further back.
As musicians, we are trained to move forward. To resolve. To arrive.
But healing doesn’t always work that way.
This playlist lives alongside our January concert, not as an extension of the program, but as a companion. None of this music appears on stage. Instead, it occupies the quiet spaces around it — the moments before rehearsal, the drive home, the evenings when words feel insufficient.
What these pieces share is patience.
They don’t explain pain.
They don’t dramatize grief.
They don’t rush toward hope.
They sit with what is already there.
I believe deeply that music heals not because it fixes us, but because it listens when we don’t know how to speak. It gives shape to emotions we’ve learned to carry silently — loss, fatigue, resilience, memory, love.
This January, I invite you not to use this music, but to be with it.
Let it move at its own pace.
Let it meet you where you are.
This is what we carry.
And this is how we carry it — together.
— Henry Cheng