2023-2024
Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder
One hundred years after its world premiere—and more than 90 years since ASO founder Leopold Stokowski premiered the work in the U.S. with the Philadelphia Orchestra—the ASO presents Arnold Schoenberg’s massive Gurre-Lieder. Wagnerian in conception, the cantata represents what is arguably the apotheosis of late Romanticism, with lush, colorful orchestration, endless melodies, and highly chromatic…
Read MoreDvořák’s Requiem
Dating from the composer’s late creative period, Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem mystifyingly remains a rarity in his impressive oeuvre. It is nowhere near as well known, or as frequently performed, as the composer’s late symphonies, chamber works, or other choral works, such as his Stabat Mater, from this period. Closer to Fauré’s or Cherubini’s contributions to the…
Read MoreJudas Maccabaeus
This holiday season the ASO offers an alternative to George Frideric Handel’s Messiah with another oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus. Set amidst the story of Hanukkah, the oratorio is a dramatization of the Jews’ resistance towards their oppressors during the Maccabean revolt. Handel’s depiction of a peoples’ triumph over tyranny is brought to life through exultant choruses…
Read MoreAmerica UNBOUND – Canceled
Due to inclement weather, this performance has been canceled. A new work commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra, written by composer and percussionist Javier Diaz, whose studio credits include Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights. Commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra, this chamber music composition incorporates stylistic elements from music across the Americas and takes…
Read MoreAmerica UNBOUND – Canceled
Due to inclement weather, this performance has been canceled. A new work commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra, written by composer and percussionist Javier Diaz, whose studio credits include Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights. Commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra, this chamber music composition incorporates stylistic elements from music across the Americas and takes…
Read MoreAmerican Expressions – SOLD OUT
Forging a new partnership with Kupferberg Center for the Arts, the ASO will co-present a free Sunday matinee at Queens College/CUNY. 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…
Read MoreAmerican Expressions
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…
Read MoreBard Music Festival — Program 11
Program Eleven presents Vaughan Williams’ opera, Sir John in Love, in a semi-staged production by American director Alison Moritz, whose projects have been called “raw, funny, surreal, and disarmingly human” (Opera News). Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra, it is with this rare American presentation of Vaughan Williams’s opera that the 2023 Bard Music Festival draws to…
Read MoreBard Music Festival — Program 9
Program Nine marks the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the festival, presenting two of his late symphonies alongside other key orchestral works of the period. While drawing on his own incidental music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, his Seventh Symphony, is nonetheless a fully realized modern masterpiece. Scored for…
Read MoreHenri VIII at Bard SummerScape
Henri VIII is French grand opera at its most magnificent. In this love triangle for the ages, an infamous Tudor king is determined to divorce Catherine of Aragon in favor of the ambitious, beautiful Anne Boleyn. Saint-Saëns’s exquisite vocal passages and rich orchestration bring this rarely performed masterpiece to vivid life in this captivating new production.…
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