The Sound of Compassion with Apollo Chamber Players: Music, Poetry and Hope for Our Community

About this event

Adults. Our Compassion Week 2026 closing event highlights how compassion grows through the music we share, poetry we hear, and the actions we take together. Experience what becomes possible when arts-cultural, civic, faith, and nonprofit organizations such as the Harris County Public Library, the Ismaili Council and Compassionate Houston work together for the common good. Join Apollo Chamber Players and the above collaborators for a program cultivating connective harmony in a fractured world. Apollo, recipient of Compassionate Houston's 2022 Compassion in the Arts award, performs Daniel Bernard Roumain's And Still We Cross, a new commission inspired by the words of Kenneth Morris Jr., a living descendant of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. "Freedom is not a gift we inherit," Morris writes. "It is a promise we renew." The program also features John Cornelius's PAX (Peace) with Houston Poet Laureate Outspoken Bean,Tenor Kenneth Gayle, Resting States by Rice University faculty composer Anthony Brandt, Quartet for Strings by Texas-born composer Julia Smith, and New Apollo arrangements of folk songs from Greece, Armenia, and Ukraine. The gathering will include an intermission space for refreshments, connection and simple gestures of kindness, such as support of Harris County Public Library (HCPL) and writing/adding notes of compassion to seed packets for HCPL Seed Libraries. This event will help us celebrate how Compassion Week 2026 ‘s theme has taken root, grown and, with our help, will flourish for generations to come.