Thu 4/27 @ 7:30PM
Fri 4/28 @ 7:30PM
Sat 4/29 @ 8PM
The Cleveland Orchestra’s next concert paints a complicated view of America, through the eyes of a visiting 19th-century composer and two late 20th century African-American composers.
Symphony concertgoers will of course be familiar with Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”), written while he was the director of New York’s National Conservatory of Music of America from 1892-1895. It’s frequently programmed on orchestra halls.
Jazz/classical crossover trumpet player/composer/band leader Wynton Marsalis has become a highly successful, high-profile icon in both musical areas. Now he’s written a new concerto for trumpet, specifically for the Cleveland Orchestra’s Principal Trumpet Michael Sachs, who will be playing at its debut performances.
The opening piece on the program, Julius Eastman’s 1983 Symphony No. II, probably won’t be familiar to most. Though he was a versatile musician who explored groundbreaking ideas in his pieces that crossed genres, he had a chaotic career and life, unable to find steady work in academia or attention for his compositions, using his identity as a gay Black musician to get in people’s faces (including giving some of his pieces names we don’t want to print here). He fell into a life of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction, which eventually led his death in 1990 at the age of 49, his trajectory the opposite of Marsalis’s
The Orchestra’s Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will be on the podium. Get tickets here.