Houston Ballet’s memorable program concluded with 1980’s “Four Last Songs,” a ballet Stevenson choreographed in tribute to the memory of Winifred Wallace, a founding board member of the company. 

Danced to Richard Strauss’ cycle on life’s changing seasons and featuring soprano Aubry Ballarò, the ballet began with the song “Frühling” (Spring). 

Eight dancers in two single-file lines of four ceremonially marched onto the stage and then broke off into four backward-striding male-female couples. Lead couple Song Teng and Toku adopted a hopeful demeanor that was in stark contrast to the other dancers' expressions of sorrow and distress during it. That dichotomy of emotion continued in the ballet’s second song, “September,” whose lyrics spoke of “a dying garden dream.” It showcased the trio of Tyler Donatelli, Harper Watters, and Muhammad, twisting, turning, and intertwining in Stevenson’s reverential yet sanguine choreography, which also saw Donatelli ethereally lifted overhead and carried about the stage. 

The trio then gave way to a pas de deux performed by Bridget Allinson-Kuhns and Julian Amir Lacey in the third song “Beim Schlafengehen” (While going to sleep). They portrayed a couple inexorably bound to each other, who distressingly got separated from one another, only to find each other again. As Ballarò sang of slumbering in “the enchanted circle of night,” the song concluded with two male dancers entering the stage and lifting Allinson-Kuhns, who lay flat out with her arms crossed over her chest, above their heads as if in a funeral procession, and carried her into the wings.  

The moving ballet’s final song, “Im Abendrot” (At Gloaming), featured the lone figure of dancer Estheysis Menendez, referenced in the song as an angelic bird, moving slowly through an emotionally tortured solo. Captivating in her stage presence and dancing, the raven-haired Menendez’s demeanor turned to one of empathy as others in the cast returned to the stage, including the two men carrying Allinson-Kuhns. The dancers each gave Menendez grace. She, in turn, comforted them as each began to lie peacefully on their backs on the stage floor as their final resting place.