Rabia Brooke

Blooming Under Blue Skies

Nova Linea Musica’s season finale brings together vibrant voices from around the world in Blooming under Blue Skies, a night of bold premieres and cross-cultural resonance. At the heart of the program is the world premiere of a Nova Linea Musica commission by Grammy-nominated composer Clarice Assad, whose music pulses with rhythmic vitality, expressive nuance, and Brazilian warmth.

The evening also features Leon First’s shimmering Two Slovenian Songs, Hakki Cengiz Eren’s atmospheric Three Portals with guitarist Mak Grgić, and David Ludwig’s Prima Variations, performed with Desirée Ruhstrat. To close, Rabia Brooke joins Grgić for selections from Piazzolla’s sultry Histoire du Tango. Join us for a celebration of global artistry in full bloom.

Featring: Mak Grgić (guitar), Desirée Ruhstrat (violin), Wendy Sutter (cello), and Rabia Brooke (violin)

‍

Every season has a first night, and this one belongs to Rabia Brooke. The season opens with an evening that moves between the familiar and the newly imagined - works drawn from the heart of the chamber repertoire alongside music written for this moment. The violin has carried human feeling across four centuries of music-making, from the courts of Baroque Europe to the concert halls of today, and few artists understand that continuum as instinctively as Rabia Brooke. Performed on the 1731 Lady Jeanne Stradivarius on generous loan, she brings to each piece the quality that defines her artistry: the sense that the music is being discovered, not simply delivered. Colleagues join her on stage for an evening that sets the tone for everything that follows.

Midwinter in Chicago, and the music turns inward. Rabia Brooke and colleagues bring works that ask quiet, essential questions - about time, about memory, about what it means to listen carefully in a world that rarely slows down. The chamber music tradition has always found its deepest expression in rooms like this one: close, warm, unhurried, alive to the details that larger halls swallow whole. The CheckOut in January is its own particular thing - the lake outside, the audience near, the conversation between performers and listeners something closer to a dialogue than a performance. These are pieces that reward exactly that kind of intimacy, drawn from across the full arc of the repertoire and performed by artists who know how to use the room they are in.

Inheritance is what we carry forward, and what we make new. This evening moves between musical generations - works that have endured alongside music being heard for the first time, each in conversation with the other. The great violin repertoire is itself an act of inheritance: pieces passed from teacher to student, from recording to live performance, from one generation's understanding to the next. Among the premieres on this program: the Chicago debut of Chen Yi's "My Childhood Memories," a solo violin work commissioned by Nova Linea Musica. To hear a piece of this personal depth - memories rendered in sound, filtered through one of the most distinctive compositional voices of our time - performed on the 1731 Lady Jeanne Stradivarius is to understand exactly why new music needs a home like this one.

The World Made Larger is when the season closes the way it should: with something that has never been heard before. A world premiere by composer Elizabeth Younan anchors an evening alongside works that have shaped Rabia Brooke's musical life - pieces from the canon that illuminate what Younan's new work is in conversation with, and what it moves beyond. Younan's voice is one that rewards close attention: intricate, luminous, and built on the conviction that music should expand what we are capable of feeling. The violin repertoire grows one work at a time, each premiere a small act of faith that what is written today will matter tomorrow. This is an evening about arrival - the arrival of a new work into the world, and the particular kind of attention that only live music, in a room like this, can ask of us.

‍