2022-2023

Anchored by the ASO, this all-Rachmaninoff event opens with the First Symphony, which the composer abandoned after its ill-starred premiere, and died without hearing a second time. Nevertheless, the work remained important to him—45 years later, he quoted from it in the Symphonic Dances, his last major composition—and since its posthumous rediscovery, the symphony has been…

It was the runaway success of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto that helped restore his confidence after the depression and writer’s block triggered by his First Symphony’s failure. Marking the ASO’s first concert of the 2022 festival, Program Three juxtaposes the concerto—arguably the best-loved in the classical canon—with closely contemporaneous orchestral works by two of Rachmaninoff’s fellow…

Considered Strauss’s only true comic opera, this rarely performed work is by turns elegiac and incisively witty. The brilliantly written libretto by Stefan Zweig (loosely based on the Renaissance play by Ben Jonson) features a madcap cast of characters in a variety of guises. The imaginative and colorful production by Christian Räth (Das Wunder der…