Zosha Di Castri
Morse Recital Hall
New Haven
Feb. 5, 2026
Under Johnson Li’s deft fingers, the Steinway at Morse Recital Hall came vividly alive on Thursday night.
Li, a student at Yale School Music, performed renowned composer Zosha Di Castri’s “Untellable Hour of Quiet” during the first show of the spring semester. In addition to featuring guest composer Di Castri, the show highlighted the work of several highly talented student composers.
“Untellable Hour of Quiet” was written in response to the smoke of Canada’s wildfires that spread across North America (apparently, even Europe) in 2023 and cast an eerie yellow haze in places like New York, where Di Castri is based, and our very own New Haven.
Her composition also functions as a conceptual response to early twentieth century composer Maurice Revel’s “Oiseaux tristes,” which translates to “sad birds.” Revel’s piece imagines a solitary bird whistling a melancholy tune before other birds join in. In Di Castri’s answer to Revel’s piece, humans are those sad birds, not trapped in a suffocating forest but stuck in the purgatory of an otherworld.
At the opening of “Untellable Hour of Quiet,” achingly slow resounding notes hardened into a brittle pitch. A high key sounded repeatedly like a warning bell. Then a bright glissando came abruptly, interrupting the stillness of the piece.
Graceful chords rolled over one another, only to be disrupted by thunderous notes. Then came the bright notes of warning again followed by jagged, atonal chords. Li attacked the keyboard so forcefully the keys seemed on the verge of splintering. Then the song quieted it as if it was coming to a close. Quiet not as calm, but as something charged, ominous, and unresolved.
The audience sat with those lingering notes, wondering what would come next. It felt as if any sound risked breaking a spell, or exposing what the quiet was trying to hide.
Li then plunged back into the opening motif, the atmosphere once again nightmarish. Sharp, glassy attacks pierced stretches of near silence. Notes arrived like isolated thoughts, then dissipated.
As the song came to a close, shimmering chords led to a delicate riff that evoked the fragile loveliness of a butterfly’s fluttering wings.
“Untellable Hour of Quiet” draws its title from poet Frank O’Hara’s “Maurice Revel”:
…If, at the untellable hour of quiet,
he had not put fingernail to
waterglass, what trees we’d’ve
turned to! fugitive, quivering.
That “quivering” unease permeates Di Castri’s composition. The piece invokes the spookiness of climate change, anxiety about the future, and a spiritual longing for nature, all filtered through an introspective sonic language.
Harmonies hovered and dissolved at the piano’s edges, asking the audience to listen closely to the subtleties of timbre and silence – to dwell with uncertainty rather than resolve it. Yet that final hopeful note hinted quietly at a brighter future.
