2024-2025

Religion, power, ego, and manipulation collide in composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s glorious psychodrama. Director Christian Räth (Die schweigsame Frau, 2022 and Das Wunder der Heliane, 2019) returns for a third SummerScape to lead a visionary new production of a grand opera with colorful vocal passages, inventive orchestrations, and a catastrophic end. Sung in French with English supertitles.…

The 34th Bard Music Festival: Berlioz and His World A singular composer, writer, and conductor, Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) is the definitive Romantic composer. Drawing music and sound into dialogue with a wide range of cultural, political, scientific, and literary currents, the impact of his musical thinking and innovations is felt to this day. The 2024…

The ASO presents a free concert as part of the Picnic Performance series at Bryant Park with a program of music sourced from dance salons, opera houses, cabaret, and the silver screen. For our third consecutive year debuting our season at Bryant Park, the American Symphony Orchestra is pleased to present, Beyond the Hall, a program exploring music that…

The ASO will co-present a free Saturday matinee with Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College/CUNY. Beyond the Hall explores music that draws its inspiration from outside the traditional concert setting. From the dance salon (Florence Price’s Suite of Dances) and the theater (Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Bernstein’s On the Town), and from the opera stage (Joplin’s Treemonisha), to the silver screen (Herrmann’s film score for…

Long associated with the instrumental genre, Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach is most well-known for his concertos, sonatas, and symphonies. These works earned him a leading position in the years of the Rococo period, bridging the Baroque and Classical eras. Less well-known are his vocal compositions: his oratorios—a genre he explored only three times—are rarely, if ever,…

The ASO’s first concert at the new David Geffen Hall focuses on music of composers who came of age in the 1920s. Chief among them was Edgard Varèse. Varèse’s symphonic poem Arcana (1925-27) explores the mysterious and powerful nature of the constellations above. Varèse took his inspiration for the work from topics of alchemy and…

Completed in 1893, Richard Strauss’s first opera to receive a premiere is rarely performed today. The ASO’s presentation marks its first performance in New York City in this century. A riveting story of love, guilt and renunciation, Guntram reveals a young Strauss positioning himself as the successor to Wagner. In his very first opera, Strauss’s…