Beyond the Score

Top three photos, clockwise from upper left: Pierre Boulez, Johannes Brahms, Maurice Ravel

GERARD McBURNEY creative director

Designed for newcomers to classical music and longtime aficionados alike, each Beyond the Score program takes you on a dramatic exploration of a composer’s music. With live actors, stunning visual projections and musical excerpts played by the CSO, the compelling story of the composer’s life and art unfolds, illuminating the world that shaped the work’s creation.

November 14 & 16

Boulez AT 90 Provisionally definitive

In 2015 Pierre Boulez turns 90, and Beyond the Score celebrates with a phantasmagorical acoustic and theatrical journey through a lifetime of musical adventures, innovations and discoveries. Performed within an extraordinary, specially commissioned design, this production will mix live performance with rare archival footage and new interviews with the composer and conductor who was, from the first, one of Beyond the Score’s most passionate champions.

March 27 & 29

Brahms Symphony No . 3 Free but happy

In the summer of 1883, vacationing in the ancient German spa town of Wiesbaden, Brahms celebrated his recent 50th birthday by composing one of his mellowest and most open-hearted orchestral works. When he showed the score to his lifelong friend Clara Schumann, she exclaimed: “One beat of the heart, every movement a jewel!”

June 5 & 7

RAVEL: A PORTRAIT Complex but never complicated

In a season in which the CSO plays an especially large number of pieces by this most beloved of French composers, Beyond the Score responds with a musical and dramatic depiction of this complex, subtle, private, paradoxical and mysterious man who once declared: ‘’My teacher in composition was Edgar Allan Poe... He taught me that true art is a perfect balance between pure intellect and emotion.”