Composer

Jonathon Heyward closes his debut season as BSO Music Director drenched in the unabashed emotions of Richard Strauss’ swan song, sung by Artist in Residence Christine Goerke. Respighi’s evergreen depictions of towering pine trees around the Eternal City anchor the timelessness of this art form, while the future comes forward in 

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The Pines Of Rome

Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall

The Music Center at Strathmore

McGill is the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and maintains a dynamic solo and chamber music career.

Gryphon Trio with Anthony McGill, clarinet

University of South Alabama

History meets symphony in composer James Lee III’s Visions of Cahokia, inspired by the ancient capital of Mississippian Native American culture that flourished along the waterways of North America before European contact. Hear a spiritual nod to the mighty Mississippi in Duke Ellington’s The River, and an impressionistic journey out to sea in Debussy’s atmospheric La Mer, while Copland’s gorgeously fluid Clarinet Concerto gets star treatment by MSO’s own Ken Graves. 

Bravo 4: Alluvial Soundscape

Thalia Mara Hall

Conductor Mei-Ann Chen, praised for her passionate conducting style, leads the Orchestra in the Florida premiere of the new concerto for piano and orchestra, Shades of Unbroken Dreams, by Orlando favorite James Lee III. Bookending the Concerto is Emilie Mayer’s Overture, whose Romantic vocabulary explores Faust’s searching, questing soul and leads into the beautiful conclusion of our concert, Brahms’s Third, often called his most personal symphony. “Like a rainbow after a thunderstorm,” as the composer’s biographer Karl Geiringer describes it, with an emotional palette that paints in colors of yearning, reflection, and serene acceptance.

Brahms Third Symphony

Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

Metropolitan Opera star Susanna Phillips brings her radiant soprano to the PCMS stage for the first time in seven seasons for this collaborative performance with New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinet Anthony McGill and pianist Myra Huang. Their program juxtaposes two Schubert works with much more recent pieces by American composers, including Chavah’s Daughters Speak, a new song cycle by James Lee, III for the same instrumentation as Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock. Setting poetry by Lou Ella Hickman, Lee, III gives voice to “thoughts that might have been spoken by women from the Bible who were not given an opportunity to have their expressions recorded in the sacred scriptures.”

Susanna Phillips, soprano & Anthony McGill, clarinet & Myra Huang, piano

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

After a remarkable opening to the concert, in which mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard performs Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, the program shifts to music written for string quartets—and quartets powerfully augmented into quintets. It begins with Justinian Tamusuza’s bright and driving Ekitundu Ekisooka, made world famous by the Kronos Quartet’s chart-topping Pieces of Africa. Two movements follow from James Lee III’s Clarinet Quintet, recently premiered by the Pacifica Quartet and New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill. Andy Akiho’s exhilarating LIgNEouS 1 features extended technique from string and percussion instruments alike. The program closes with Beach’s potent Piano Quintet, which includes direct references to Brahms’s seminal Piano Quintet.

The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble

Carnegie Hall

Celebrated French conductor Fabien Gabel leads orchestral showstoppers direct from France, plus a world premiere by Michigan-born composer James Lee III. Shades of Unbroken Dreams honors the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream"—a speech he famously delivered in Washington, DC in 1963, words that first rang out in Detroit, after a historic march down Woodward Avenue.

French Passions & Enduring Dreams

Orchestra Hall

Artistic Director Stéphane Denève returns for an emotional concert that explores true love and loss. Inspired by the love-drenched pages of William Shakespeare, Sergei Prokofiev creates musical fireworks in his portrayal of Romeo and Juliet. Soprano Kelley O’Connor—whose past NWS performance was hailed a tour de force by South Florida Classical Review—returns for one of Denève’s favorite works: Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs. James Lee III conjures the historic indigenous metropolis of Cahokia.

Denève: Prokofiev's Romeo + Juliet

New World Center

American composer James Lee III’s opening piece invokes the Hebrew holiday of Sukkot and draws inspiration from passages in the Book of Job and Revelations, creating a world both old and new. Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 is in one movement and is only 20 minutes long, but in that compact space, he defies the inherited world of the symphonic tradition to create his own personal vision of the possibilities of orchestral music. The evolution of his melodies throughout the piece and the harmonic soundscape he conjures is like nothing before or after him. It is one of the most beautiful and moving works ever written for symphony orchestra.

Three Worlds

New Bedford High School

Jonathon Heyward celebrates his arrival as Music Director with vibrant studies of the United States, culminating with Dvořák’s epic Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”) that draws on spirituals and indigenous melodies. Gershwin’s feisty concerto brings the excitement of the Jazz Age into the concert hall, featuring the “brilliant and stylish pianist” Jean-Yves Thibaudet whose interpretation is “alive with incisive rhythms, Ravelian colorings, telling intricacy, and refreshingly cool restraint” (The New York Times). Baltimore’s own James Lee III taps into Black and Native traditions in his evocative answer to Dvořák’s American vision.

New World Symphony With Heyward

Franz Schubert’s Four Impromptus D. 935 interwoven with compositions by Florence Price, William Grant Still, Margaret Bonds, and James A. Lee III.

Sunday Music Series 2

The Chapel Restoration

String quartet and soprano in a program featuring James Lee III's "A Double Standard" premiered by the same ensemble in Carnegie Hall in 2022.

TLI Presents: Pacifica Quartet and Karen Slack, soprano

Tanglewood Music Center

Possessing a “tone that draws in one’s ear with sounds and ideas that simply cannot be resisted” (Philadelphia Inquirer), flutist Julietta Curenton joins “leading new-music foursome” (New York Times) the JACK Quartet in a concert that includes the Philadelphia premiere of Iranian composer Aida Shirazi’s Vestiges. The program concludes with John Zorn’s Nachträglichkeit, a work for string quartet and flute that is full of surprises, from extremely quiet moments to unexpected, fast blows.

JACK Quartet & Julietta Curenton, flute

American Philosophical Society

Francis Poulenc combined oboe, bassoon, and piano in his 1926 Trio. The Poulenc Trio was formed in 2003 to further explore this instrumentation. Since then, they have commissioned 20 works. The last time they played at the Athenaeum was in 2010, and they’ll bring some newly commissioned works along with their signature piece.

James Lee III

Composer

Events

Past events

13 - 16 Jun, 2024

The Pines Of Rome · Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Mar 17, 2024

Gryphon Trio with Anthony McGill, clarinet · Mobile Chamber Music

About

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