Ruth Crawford Seeger composed Suite for Wind Quintet in 1952, 16 years since writing any significant compositions and a year before she died from cancer. Principal Cello Julie Albers takes the spotlight in Franz Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D, the second of two cello concertos composed twenty years apart. Written in dedication to and in competition with his close friend Mieczysław Weinberg, Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 will be performed in an arrangement for Chamber Symphony.

EPSG:4326

Julie Albers Plays Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D

St. Andrew's Lutheran Church

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts

Saint Paul's United Church of Christ

Stravinsky and Mozart both wrote music that positively sparkles and shimmers on the stage and in your ear. Two of the best examples are combined here. Stravinsky orchestrated and arranged some charming dances from the 18th century for his ballet "Pulcinella" and Mozart ended his symphonic output with this famous 41st. Its courageous skill and scale have given it the nickname "Jupiter."

Pulcinella

Adrian College

Aaron Copland’s exuberant Appalachian Spring celebrates the American pioneer spirit and famously quotes the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts.

Copland—American Traditions

Lesher Center for the Arts

Continuing a partnership forged between the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bryant Park Corporation in the wake of COVID-19, the ASO will present a free concert as part of the Picnic Performance series at Bryant Park. The program highlights the different forms of expression and musical languages that emerged in the 1920s, including new elements of dance, theater and jazz.

In the years immediately following World War I, the American artistic scene experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity. Responding to the horror and brutality of that war, artists, writers and composers rejected the exalted ideals of the previous century, focusing instead on creating new means of expression, ones that would accurately reflect the realities this new age required. With jazz, many American composers found a new source of inspiration, one distinctly American, as well as thoroughly fresh, modern and exciting. Some of the works offered in this program reflect this fascination in the Roaring Twenties with this language, with its irresistible rhythmic energy and catchy melodies. Other composers sought to push the boundaries of musical expression with radical, ‘ultra-modern’ languages. Whether by polytonality, jagged counterpoint and asymmetric ostinatos, or brash atonality—in which melody, harmony and rhythm are harshly distorted and deconstructed—the experimental impulses of this generation are presented here in its arguably finest exponents.

American Expressions

Bryant Park

Kupferberg Center for the Arts

Pianist and composer Conrad Tao made his SPCO debut in a program built around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s monumental Piano Concerto No. 24. A Renaissance madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, a sunny keyboard concerto by C.P.E. Bach, and a cryptic work for viola and piano by Morton Feldman were like a twisting labyrinth of darkness and light that anticipated the harmonic instability and searching quality of Mozart’s concerto. Ruth Crawford-Seeger’s Music for Small Orchestra framed this journey with a slow, pensive descent into the dark maze and a roguish finale that climbs towards a window of light.

Conrad Tao Plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24

Ted Mann Concert Hall

Ruth Crawford Seeger, ultramodernist composer and matriarch of the folk-revival Seeger family, composed in radically different styles. Music for Small Orchestra came from her early, avant-garde period, while “Rissolty Rossolty,” a crazy-quilt polyphony of three folk tunes, was composed as a whimsical tribute to the never-ending energy of folk music. David Fung, who performed with VSO in 2018 to great acclaim, returns to play Tchaikovsky’s tempestuous Piano Concerto No. 1. The melody from this concerto’s iconic opening became a huge hit when transformed into the love song “Tonight We Love,” but the rest of this audacious early work is even more compelling, as it alternates between dreamy passion and quick passages of dazzling difficulty. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 shows the master at the height of his powers—transporting us from a pastoral beginning through wry humor, high tragedy, and triumph. 

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Events

Past events

17 - 19 May, 2024

Julie Albers Plays Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D · Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

Mar 15, 2024

Pulcinella · Adrian Symphony Orchestra

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