Meet Nokuthula Ngwenyama, familiarly known as “Thula,” an award-winning violist and composer of Zimbabwean and Japanese descent, educated at elite legacy institutions like the Colburn School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Her new piano quartet Elegy, we are told, was written in response to “the tragic events and social reckoning of 2020.” The pianist Joseph Kalichstein, who died in March of this year, described it as “a heart-wrenching tribute to the victims of racial prejudice and the struggle for equality and justice,” and was looking forward to playing the premiere. (His replacement has yet to be announced.) Of Ngwenyama’s music, the critic Mark Swed has written, “Sounds get along not necessarily through traditional harmonic consonance (although there is plenty of that), but through a kind of rightness of being.” Want to judge for yourself what that gnomic précis might mean? The Kennedy Center’s Fortas Chamber Music Concerts series affords three opportunities this season. On January 25, 2023, Ngwenyama’s Sexagesimal Celebration shares a bill with the two string sextets of Johannes Brahms. And on April 27, 2023, the Isidore String Quartet juxtaposes her Violin/Viola Duo with works of J. S. Bach, Billy Childs, and Benjamin Britten. —Matthew Gurewitsch