Letters from Home: Orchestra of St. Luke’s Performs Uproot

Composers Luigi Boccherini, Iman Habibi and Antonin Dvořák shared the common experience of uprootedness and expressed their tangled feelings of the unfamiliarity of new environs and nostalgia for the comforts of home. In his Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, Boccherini hewed so closely to the sounds and sense of his home city of Madrid, he despaired that it might leave audiences elsewhere unable to comprehend its significance. In Uproot, Habibi meditated on leaving his home in Iran to settle in Canada. And in his String Quintet No. 3 in E-flat Major, Dvořák drew on the musical influences he’d absorbed in Iowa.