New York, NY, October 2025
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music reached its full 250-seat capacity on Friday night as CreArtBox launched its 2025/26 concert season with Beyond the Surface. The evening offered much more than a chamber music performance, it became an invitation to listen deeply, to experience sound, image, and form.
A Concert That Looks Beneath the Surface
Beyond the Surface wasn’t just a title, it was a mission. The audience was immersed in an evening where historical and contemporary music coexisted naturally, revealing emotional and visual depth.
The highlight of the night was the world premiere of Twilight at Dawn by composer Devin Cholodenko, written for flute and strings. Having the composer present made the premiere especially meaningful. The piece explored the liminal space between night and day, blending seamlessly with the rest of the program.
The Music: Ravel, Brahms, and a New Voice
The program featured Maurice Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye, Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 3, and the premiere of Twilight at Dawn by Cholodenko. Ravel’s fairy-tale miniatures felt timeless, delicate, mysterious, and filled with the subtle unease that lies beneath childhood imagination.
Brahms’s quartet, by contrast, opened an emotional chasm of late-Romantic intensity. The interplay between strings and piano created moments of complete synchronicity, where the ensemble breathed as one.
The Ensemble and Visual Design
The performance featured:
• Emma Frucht, violin
• Matthew Cohen, viola
• Julia Yang, cello
• Josefina Urraca, piano
• Guillermo Laporta, flute and stage design
For this concert, Guillermo Laporta developed a visual component inspired by the original illustrations that accompanied Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye. These were transformed into subtle animations that unfolded live with the music, a seamless blend of classical performance and digital art.
This performance was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, The Amphion Foundation and by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Their commitment to new work and interdisciplinary collaboration makes events like this possible.
“Music must always flow, for that is part of its very essence, but the creation of that continuity and flow, that long line, constitutes the be-all and end-all of every composer’s existence.”
— Aaron Copland
