The Detroit Symphony Orchestra & The American Romanian Festival celebrating its 20th-anniversary season present an evening of works centered around the subject of death. The first work on the program, Rota II by Romanian composer Cornelia Tăutu, is a duet for violin and violoncello that opens slowly and austerely and evokes the contemplative nature of a long-forgotten ancestral melody. George Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War is expressed through his threnody, Black Angels. The work is structured around the numbers 13 and 7, numerals often related to fate and destiny, and several tonal musical quotations can be found throughout the piece, including snippets from our next work on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Written in 1824, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was the composer’s coming to terms with his long-term illness and impending death, and has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.”