Network for New Music continues its 2025-26 season with a special concert honoring the 100th birthday of author and illustrator Edward Gorey. The ensemble, which specializes in contemporary classical music of a broad variety of styles, will present Carla Kihlstedt’s “Little Deaths,” a song cycle for singing violinist and chamber orchestra with the composer as soloist.

Two performances of the work have been scheduled. The first is set for Friday, Feb. 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Settlement Music School’s Peter A. Benoliel Germantown Branch, 6128 Germantown Ave. The second will be Monday, Feb. 23, at 7 p.m. in Haverford College’s Jaharis Hall.

“Carla Kihlstedt’s ‘Little Deaths’ embodies what I find most compelling about contemporary music: a sharp imagination, emotional breadth, and a fearless curiosity about the strange places where beauty and darkness touch,” Network’s artistic director Thomas Schutterhelm said in a press release. “Drawing on Edward Gorey’s wonderfully bleak illustrations, the piece inhabits that space where ‘the banality of life and the inexhaustible oddness of the human imagination’ coexist.

Kihlstedt’s music, he continued, “doesn’t merely accompany these images, it illuminates them. She reveals a sonic world just beyond the frame. Following in the lineage of [Hans] Eisler and [Kurt] Weill, she combines art song, cabaret, and popular idioms into something intimate, theatrical, and deeply human. As a composer/performer, a singing violinist, Carla is an artist for whom sound, gesture, and voices are inseparable. The piece radiates an embodied storytelling that feels decidedly personal.”

Schutterhelm concluded, “This work conjures a fantasy where the line between the ordinary and the uncanny is continually crossed, and the music accompanying that transmigration shimmers with strangeness. Programming is not just an artistic choice: It feels like an invitation into a world where imagination is allowed to be as dark, playful, and deeply felt as life itself.”

Information and tickets are available at networkfornewmusic.org/dark-whimsy.

Philadelphia Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra continued its winning ways with a trio of concerts performed Jan. 9, 10 and 11, in the Kimmel Center’s Marian Anderson Hall. The Jan. 9 and 11 concerts were matinees, and the Jan. 10 concert was an evening performance.

On the podium was guest conductor Dalia Stasevska overseeing a program constructed in the time-honored and successful arrangement of overture-concerto-intermission-symphony. John Adams’ delightful “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” opened the program. It was followed by Samuel Barber’s beloved Violin Concerto, Opus 14, with Augustin Hadelich as soloist. After intermission, Stasevska led Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G major, with Joelle Harvey the soprano soloist in the closing movement.

Barber, a native of West Chester as well as an alumnus and faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music here in Philadelphia, was one of those composers who suffered the “slings and arrows” of critics who no longer wanted to hear beautiful music but, rather, chose to laud and honor those who followed Arnold Schoenberg, after World War I, off the precipice of major/minor tonality into the dead end of serialism, which has never been accepted by the broad public. The result was that Barber and his musical output were often cast aside as hopelessly out of date even though his music always struck a responsive chord among the audiences who had the chance hear his music.

Fortunately, times have changed and Barber and many of his compatriots are experiencing a resurgence of respect and affection. His Violin Concerto is nowadays accepted as one of the gems of the repertoire and Hadelich gave it a brilliant and emotional reading.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is, perhaps, the most appealing of the nine he completed. Transparent in orchestral texture and overflowing in Viennese lyricism, it conjures up images of Vienna when it was the carefree capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire of the legendary Hapsburgs.

Stasevska elicited glowing playing from the Philadelphians, who can still channel the Viennese training of their former music director, Eugene Ormandy.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.