Composer

Join us for the grand finale of our 15th anniversary season with America's Haydn Festival! Pay homage to the visionary father of the Symphony and the String Quartet, Franz Joseph Haydn. Delve into a celebration of musical innovation with masterworks that were ahead of their time. Delight in Joseph Bologne's evocative Overture to 'L'amant anonyme,' relish the profound depth of Haydn's Symphony No. 44 in E minor 'Trauer,' and revel in one of Beethoven’s most inspired creations, Symphony No. 7 in A. This remarkable festival serves as a testament to our rich musical heritage and an exhilarating glimpse into the vibrant future of the GCO. Join us for an exceptional event that will leave you inspired and in awe of the transformative power of music.

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America's Haydn Festival

Austin Peay State University

New Jersey Symphony: Gil Shaham and Xian Zhang

New Jersey Performing Arts Center

A romantic comedy ahead of its time, The Anonymous Lover centers on young widow Léontine. When she begins to receive a series of passionate letters from a secret admirer, she wrestles with whether she can love again, especially when it becomes apparent her friend Valcour is the unsigned author. Will love win?

The Anonymous Lover

Academy of Music

A beautiful young widow is disillusioned with romance. Her dear friend is sending her anonymous love letters to express his feelings. Will true love prevail? (It’s a comedy, so of course it will.)

Premiering in 1780, The Anonymous Lover is the only surviving opera by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. A pioneering Black composer, conductor, and violinist, Bologne achieved great renown throughout 18th-century France. Brighten up winter with the Wisconsin premiere of this charming opera!

Overture Center for the Arts

Premiering in 1780, The Anonymous Lover is the only surviving opera by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. A pioneering Black composer, conductor, and violinist, Bologne achieved great renown throughout 18th-century France. Brighten up winter with the Wisconsin premiere of this charming opera!

Conductor Jeannette Sorrell, New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, and soprano Sonya Headlam perform music of Mozart and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a French Creole contemporary of Mozart’s whose life was depicted in the 2022 film Chevalier. Composer Derek Bermel has been commissioned to transform Saint-Georges’ violin concerto into a clarinet concerto.

Mozart and the Chevalier

Hilbert Circle Theatre

The DSO delights audiences with musical pairs: two works by Bach, one featuring the famous Air and the other a concerto for two soloists featuring DSO Principal Oboe Alexander Kinmonth and Associate Concertmaster Kimberly Kaloyanides-Kennedy. "Music from Paris"—the First Symphony by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges—completes the program along with a symphony by Haydn that the Chevalier helped bring to life.

Bach & Beyond

Monroe County Community College

Congregation Shaarey Zedek

Please join us in celebrating the inaugural performance "Breaking New Ground," of New York Youth Symphony's newest program, Crescendo at Kaufman Music Center's Merkin Hall.  Launched at the start of the 2023/2024 season, Crescendo is designed for New York City string players aged 10 to 18. Led by Music Director Tanatchaya (Tanya) Chanphanitpornkit, this free program gives young New York City musicians a voice and a chance to expand their musical education through ensemble training and performances.,

New York Youth Symphony Crescendo: Breaking New Ground

Kaufman Music Center

Politics may have prompted Chicago’s nickname, but wind and water are at the heart of its identity. Dame Jane Glover leads a program impishly inspired by our hometown, including a suite from Handel’s grand Water Music. Music of the Baroque's wind and horn principals move center stage in Hummel’s Bassoon Concerto and Mozart’s fourth Horn Concerto. Symphonies by Joseph Bologne and Joseph Haydn, both members of the mysterious Freemason Society, add to the intrigue.

Windy City

Harris Theater

Politics may have prompted Chicago’s nickname, but wind and water are at the heart of its identity. Dame Jane Glover leads a program impishly inspired by our hometown, including a suite from Handel’s grand Water Music. Our wind and horn principals move center stage in Hummel’s Bassoon Concerto and Mozart’s fourth Horn Concerto. Symphonies by Joseph Bologne and Joseph Haydn, both members of the mysterious Freemason Society, add to the intrigue.

Harris Theater for Music and Dance

North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie

Mozart and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Both composers were violinists and performers who left a lasting mark on the music of the second half of the 18th-century. This performance showcases their enduring talent and style, serving as a reminder of their eternal appeal.

Mozart & Saint-Georges

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

St. George, Tchaikovsky, Brahms

New England Conservatory

Following the unrestrained music of the Romantic Era, 20th-century composers craved a return to clarity and balance, which they borrowed from the Classical Era. Featuring the Lubbock Chamber Orchestra led by Dr. Eric Allen, explore Dvořák and Stravinsky’s neoclassic twists on the classical form as we juxtapose them with their predecessors, Mozart and Bologne, “Chevalier.”

Classics and Neoclassics

Buddy Holly Hall

Lubbock Symphony: Classics and Neoclassics

Leading soloist and Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic Anthony McGill joins us in his SPCO debut for a program that showcases the rich brilliance of the clarinet, an instrument celebrated for its vast tonal range. Benjamin Britten’s three-movement Sinfonietta, highlights the musicians of the SPCO in its bareness and delicate balance between woodwinds and strings. Two Classical concertos end the program — one by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the other by his French contemporary Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Originally written for violin, this version of Bologne’s concerto has been transcribed for clarinet and was co-commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Anthony McGill Plays Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto

Benson Great Hall

Carleton College

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts

Mozart & More at the Hatch

Hatch Memorial Shell

Mozart & More in the Community

Hibernian Hall

Peoples Baptist Church

Operatic singers auditioned from around the globe to participate in the IC Opera Studio where they were staged in scenes guided by directors earning a professional certificate from the IC Opera Direction Program. The participating directors have been working since January with stage director Chuck Hudson, while the singers have been working with musical director Christopher Zemliauskas, along with conductors and acting coaches.

Opera Showcase Performance

Ithaca College

Augustin Hadelich, a violinist whose rhapsodic expressiveness has gained worldwide attention, solos in not one but two works for violin and orchestra. Stravinsky’s concerto blends neoclassical clarity and proportion with rich, playful textures. Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, No. 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, is a delicate work by a contemporary of Mozart and Haydn. JoAnn Falletta also conducts a new piece by Brian Raphael Nabors, as well as Kodály’s work infused with the sounds of Central European folk music.

Hadelich & Stravinsky

Orchestra Hall

The Atlanta Opera’s acclaimed Discoveries series continues with The Anonymous Lover, an opera written in 1780 by the groundbreaking Black composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. A beautiful young widow begins receiving love letters from an anonymous source in this timeless comic love story. As she ponders the sender of these romantic overtures and wrestles with her own doubt of rediscovering love, her dear friend battles his own feelings of anxiety and yearning as the mysterious author of these notes of affection. True love is his goal, but time will tell if he finds his love requited.

Morehouse College

Gil Shaham and Xian Zhang

Count Basie Center for the Arts

Join us for season two of the Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered series with guest artists bringing to broader recognition the music of historic composers whose works have rarely been heard. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman put it best when he wrote, “You and I could go to chamber concerts for years and never hear a program as full of surprises and discovery as this one. And we’ve been missing out.”

Catalyst Quartet

War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

Haydn’s role as friend of Mozart and teacher of Beethoven is famous, but perhaps less well-known is his extensive relationship with Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who commissioned and premiered Haydn’s Paris symphonies with the dramatic and stylish orchestra of the Concert de la Loge Olympique. It was there that Marie Antoinette fell in love with Symphony No. 85, giving rise to its nickname, “La Reine.”

Haydn & His Protégés

It was a young, desperate love that inspired Frederic Chopin. Too shy to declare his feelings, he wrote: “I say to my piano what I would like to be saying to you…”  Maria Radutu returns for Chopin’s exquisite First Piano Concerto.  Donato Cabrera has said of her: “Maria Radutu reveals these intimate emotions that people aren’t so quick to bring to the stage – there’s no filter between what she’s feeling and what she’s trying to project to the audience.”  Also, Saint-Georges will enchant with his comedic Symphony, and Mozart captures the essence of Parisian musical taste in his Symphony No. 31.

Romantic Chopin

The Smith Center for the Performing Arts

French Caribbean composer Joseph Bologne, also known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born in 1745 in the French colony of Guadaloupe to a wealthy white plantation owner and enslaved mother. Sent to Paris at 13 to gain an education, Bologne became a master swordsman, renowned violinist, and accomplished composer. The Anonymous Lover is an overture from one of his six surviving operas.
Fréderic Chopin settled in Paris at 21 but his first piano concerto was composed a year earlier in 1830, in his native Poland. Memorable, romantic, and popular with audiences, the piano is very much the star of this piece.
Born in Liège, Belgium, César Franck sought his fortune in Paris and achieved renown as an organist, teacher, and composer. From the 1920s until it inexplicably fell out of favor in the 1960s, American audiences couldn’t get enough of Franck’s sensuous and passionate Symphony in D minor. We revisit the groundbreaking piece that inspired a generation of up-and-coming French composers.

Chopin in Paris

Lesher Center for the Arts

Dame Jane Glover joins forces with “La Divina del Piano,” Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. The Symphony No. 1 in G Major by virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, exudes the perfumed charm of late 18th-century France. With its sophistication and complexity, Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 hints at what might have been if its creator’s life had not been cut tragically short.

Montero Plays Mozart

The legendary violinist Gil Shaham makes his LACO debut as a guest soloist for Arvo Pärt’s ethereal Fratres and Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ Violin Concerto No. 9. For the first time, Close Quarters cinematographer Michael Elias Thomas is filming from within the orchestra, drawing audiences into the ensemble and immersing the viewer in the beauty of pure music-making. This unique feature will enable audiences to explore the impeccable artistry of Gil Shaham and the musicians of LACO with an intimacy previously unexplored in this series.

Gil Shaham Plays Boulogne

A concert in honor and celebration of the playfulness and depth of the “classical music” of the late 18th century. In the first half, concertmaster Jeff Thayer joins music director Rafael Payare and the strings of the orchestra for a violin concerto by the Black French composer, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), preceded by Alfred Schnittke's witty reimagining of Mozart's Music for a Pantomime in the style of Haydn. In the second half, the wind instruments of the orchestra give us Mozart's glorious Gran Partita. This was the music, in the film Amadeus, which made Salieri exclaim: "It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God."

Mozart and Chevalier de Saint-Georges' Violin Concerto

Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center

The Catalyst Quartet continues its exploration of compelling chamber works in this collaborative program with bass-baritone Dashon Burton, featuring the songs of Florence B. Price.

Catalyst Quartet with Dashon Burton Bass-Baritone

Lauren Roth Plays Stravinsky

Nicholas McGegan makes music written over 200 years ago sound as if the ink is still wet. He, the NJSO and audience favorite Augustin Hadelich bring to life the rambunctious genius of a young Beethoven and the virtuosic elegance of the first known classical composer of African ancestry, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Beethoven & Saint-Georges

A contemporary of Mozart, Joseph Bologne—or the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, as he called himself—was an outstanding composer, violin virtuoso, and stellar conductor. Randall Goosby plays Saint-Georges’ dynamic Ninth Violin Concerto. Gustavo Dudamel has received high praise for his fresh interpretation of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, “[jolting] the familiar score with vitality and imagination.” (The New York Times)

Dudamel Conducts the “New World”

Hollywood Bowl

Afro-French composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a highly
acclaimed contemporary of Mozart. Experience Saint-Georges’ Symphony no 2, a
true testament to the symphonist’s extraordinary legacy.

We will celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday with our ever-popular Beethoven & Blue Jeans casual concert. We’ll feature 22-year-old virtuoso Randall Goosby performing Beethoven’s violin concerto.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

Composer

Events

Apr 28, 2024

America's Haydn Festival · Gateway Chamber Orchestra

22 - 24 Mar, 2024

New Jersey Symphony: Gil Shaham and Xian Zhang · New Jersey Symphony

2 - 4 Feb, 2024

The Anonymous Lover · Opera Philadelphia

2 - 4 Feb, 2024

The Anonymous Lover · Madison Opera

Feb 2, 2024

The Anonymous Lover · Overture Center for the Arts

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