Award-winning Violinist Ruda Lee and the Hong Kong-based ANIMA Ensemble present the world premiere of composer Scott Ordway’s new violin concerto, ‘The Memory of Winter,’ conducted by Vivian Ip. Commissioned by ANIMA, ‘The Memory of Winter’ is both a personal reflection of Ordway’s deep connection to mountain landscapes in California, and an elegy for our increasingly threatened winters.

The program is titled “Four Seasons: a Journey of 1725 – 2025,” referring to the composition dates of Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ and Ordway’s work, which bracket Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Four Seasons of Buenos Aires’ (1965).

Says Ordway, “‘The Memory of Snow’ for violin and string orchestra is a reflection on loss and change in a warming world. It began with my own memories of the snowbound alpine landscapes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Northern California, but the title also refers to what we are losing together: the cultural and ecological memory of snow as a shaping force in human life. The piece invites listeners to remember the landscapes that formed them and to imagine the fragile beauty of a world now in flux.”