Principal members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, ensembleNEWSRQ, and SMU Meadows School of the Arts’ contemporary music ensemble SYZYGY will collaborate on "Parisian Refraction," a “micro festival” that explores new music compositions that embody or have been inspired by the City of Light.

The festival contains four programs:

• April 23: “Soloists and Sinfoniettas” (Maurice Cohn, conducting) - This program features works by Unsuk Chin and Kaija Saariaho. Soloists are Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano; Samantha Bennett, violin; Conor Hanick, piano; and George Nickson, percussion.
• April 24: Solo piano recital by Conor Hanick of Hans Otte’s “Book of Sounds.” Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old.
• April 25: “Kafka Fragments,” featuring Bennett and Gibbon performing György Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments Op. 24.” The work features 40 excerpts of diary entries and writings from Franz Kafka.
• April 28: “Plucked and Stuck,” featuring work by two titans of musical thought and sonic invention: Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, each of whom changed the course of musical history in their own unique way. Emily Levin, principal harp of the Dallas Symphony and SMU faculty, leads an account of Freude by Stockhausen (both singing and playing harp), while Nickson, principal percussion of the Dallas Symphony and SMU faculty, leads Boulez’ tour de force, Sur Incises, for three harps, three pianists, and three percussionists.