"At Sunset" explores music written with an awareness of endings - not necessarily tragic endings, but music shaped by reflection, distance, acceptance, and the passing of time.The program opens with Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz, an early work filled with warmth and suspended lyricism that captures the feeling of late light before nightfall. Ottorino Respighi’s Il tramonto for soprano and string quartet, based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Sunset,” closes the first half of the program.

The second half is devoted to Beethoven’s final completed String Quartet No. 16, Op. 135. Written near the end of his life, the work contains many of the qualities associated with Beethoven’s late style: intimacy, transparency, humor, and philosophical questioning. Its final movement, built around the phrase “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”), closes the evening not with grand tragedy, but with clarity and acceptance.