6
March 28, 2026
“The Strangers’ Case”
Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston (MATCH)
Houston, Texas – USA
Kinetic Ensemble; Karim Sulayman, tenor.
Karim AL-ZAND: The Strangers’ Case (2025, World Premiere)
Igor STRAVINSKY: Apollon Musagète (1928)
Sherry Cheng | 31 MAR 2026
Co-presented by Houston’s premier new music collective Musiqa and the dynamic conductorless string orchestra Kinetic Ensemble, this weekend’s world premiere of Karim Al-Zand’s The Strangers’ Case (2025) shows that music has the profound ability to tell stories that raise our collective consciousness and sing to the better angels of our nature in troubled times.
The work’s title comes from Shakespeare’s monologue for the historical character Sir Thomas More. In it, he attempts to quell the anti-immigration May Day riot in 1517 London by appealing to the rioters’ humanity, urging them to put themselves in the immigrants’ shoes. It is one of the earliest and most impassioned defenses of a compassionate refugee policy.
Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman delivered a deeply moving, luminous performance of the work, remarkable in its clarity and sincerity, and devoid of over-dramatic sentimentality. With impeccable articulation and an instinctive sense of poetic expression, he found the emotional core of each story and evoked for the audience the vivid imagery in the text. The Kinetic Ensemble created a rich tonal landscape that deftly responded to Sulayman’s varied expressions, from sorrow to anguish, tender love to fragile hope.
“The Lady in the Harbor” draws its text from the unusual first-person collection Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves. It combines the words of a Polish girl’s account of her grueling sea voyage to America with those of a Syrian refugee’s description of New York Harbor. The opening is ominous and unsettling, an uneasy harmonic tension felt from the start. From this dark palette, the violins’ opening motif, a two-note repeated figure of rising minor third and falling augmented second, grows ever more agitated in its insistence. From the terrifying “we thought we should die,” comes the view of “the big woman with the spikes on her head.” The music here conveys a sense of wonderment. The shimmering lights of the city are vividly rendered by the flashing arpeggiated figurations that pass seamlessly throughout the violin section, each individual spark a point of illumination.
The shivering triplet figures in the high strings immediately evoke the desolate mood of the next song. The text of “Who Can Pity My Loneliness” comes from the wooden walls of the Angel Island Detention Center in San Francisco Bay. It is one of several anonymous Chinese poems inscribed by Chinese immigrants facing deportation in the wake of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (extended in 1892 and made permanent in 1902). The original poem in Chinese follows the strictly regulated verse form Qilü, four couplets arranged in eight lines, each with seven characters. It shows the person who wrote the poem is highly educated. In the poem, he is lamenting the sad state of his imprisonment. Sulayman’s plaintive tone here was the very sound of sorrow and quiet, inward lamentation.
The next three movements are performed attacca and build to an emotional climax of rising anguish. “Whither Would You Go?” is excerpted from Shakespeare’s titular speech for Thomas More. It begins with a plodding 4-note ostinato in the basses and violas. The harmony is the most consonant yet, sustained long notes expanding over the bass line in perfect 5ths, as the text implores the audience to “imagine” the plight of “strangers,” and a final “imagine” of “Whither would you go?” As Shakespeare’s text lays out the case for strangers, the music grows more aggressive and menacing, exploding in anger in the text of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Stranger” and Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem “Unguarded Gates.” The combined text of the two poems is virulently xenophobic. Here, the players’ bows bite into their strings with venom, and Shakespeare’s text returns with the heavy indictment: “This is the strangers’ case and this your mountainish inhumanity.” The violence continues in “They Came from Terror and Tumult,” Mexican poet Jaime Torres Bodet’s poem about migrants escaping their war-torn homeland, a story familiar to many. It is sad to note that Thomas More, with all his eloquence and passion, could not stop the angry mob that day in 1517 at St. Martin’s Gate.
A much-needed respite from the intensity of the middle movements arrives in the gentle setting of “Exile,” an intimate poem by Hart Crane about separated lovers. Violinist Emily Richardson perfectly evoked the lovers’ mournful sighs with her long, sustained solo lines. With the words “love endures,” Sulayman expressed the power and fragility of love with exquisite tenderness. “When Dawn Comes to the City” is by Claude McKay, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance who immigrated to the US from Jamaica in 1914. The poem contrasts the drabness of city life with memories of his home in the Caribbean. The middle section of this song contains the most joyful passage of the entire song cycle. The music is light and lilting, as it recalls the island of the sea where cocks crow and hens cackle. The strumming strings intimate a warm, folksy feeling, painting an idyllic picture of a cozy life. Sulayman’s voice was buoyant and delightful here, transferring an inward smile to the audience. But alas, it was only a dream, and the music soon returns to its dark tone of descending minor seconds as he returns to reality. It’s “dawn, dawn, dawn in New York.”
“The Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, AD 2900” is a prescient poem by Arthur Wheelock Upson written in 1908. The poet imagines a future where a tyrant has misruled the land and squandered our freedom. The Statue of Liberty is unearthed, the torch shattered in its mighty hand. The music continues in rising major thirds, leading to the final movement without pause. Emily Dickinson’s direct, unadorned four-line verse “These Strangers” asks listeners to simply befriend strangers and protect them. The music is expansive. The ensemble’s warm sound enveloped the room, subtly shaping the gentle rise and fall of the phrases. Rising thirds expanded into an extended chord that seemed to float into the heavens, ethereal and open. Sulayman’s voice, echoed by a solo violin, lingered long in the air, a transcendent moment that held the audience in thrall.
As a whole, The Strangers’ Case is a well-structured work that delivers a strong emotional impact. By drawing texts from diverse voices and historical periods, Al-Zand created a narrative that resonated deeply with the audience. This work should be heard again and again.
While The Strangers’ Case was the heart of the program, it would be remiss not to mention the Kinetic Ensemble’s brilliant performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète (1928) in the first half of the concert. Originally conceived as a ballet blanc, the piece marked the first collaboration between Stravinsky and George Balanchine. It is a piece perfectly suited to Kinetic’s pristine and unified ensemble sound. Stravinsky’s score is thoroughly neo-classical, characterized by Apollonian restraint and structural clarity. The sequence of formal dances includes a prologue (Apollo’s birth) in the style of a French Baroque overture, marked by dotted rhythms and a stately, dignified quality. Following Apollo’s variation and the dance with all three muses, each muse has a characteristic variation of her own. Calliope’s variation sets the melody in Alexandrine, an iambic hexameter associated with epic poetry. Stravinsky composed the variation by scansion, following the natural rhythms of the poetic meter. Polyhymnia’s variation is fleet and light, with its running 16th notes, showcasing the ensemble’s virtuosic agility. Terpsichore’s variation was expressive and graceful, as was the muted pas de deux, which had a beautiful singing quality. After a vibrant, energetic coda, the ensemble delivered a majestic, serene Apotheosis. As the theme from the prologue returns, the music seems to gain breadth and space, and time itself seems to be suspended as Apollo leads the muses to Parnassus. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Kinetic Ensemble: kineticensemble.org
- Musiqa: musiqa.org
- Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston (MATCH): matchouston.org
Read more by Sherry Cheng.
.png){kind=logo}