FROM THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Dear friends,

One of the most important roles that art plays in our lives is to introduce us to what we do not know, to take us outside the confines of our own experiences, to see the world as wider, more diverse, more exciting, and more filled with imagination than we had believed possible. This is true not only of the many genres and styles of music, but of dance, painting, film, poetry, and theater.

Beethoven was outspoken about this. He suggested listening to music was a way of learning about the world. And that after listening and learning, we must also “act upon what we have learned.”

Orchestral music is an especially grand way of doing this. There are so many people in the audience and on stage, and each one of us brings our own life to the shared experience of a concert. I think of this especially as this month we return to our home at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park™, an extraordinary venue in a beautiful place, where music can be performed and heard by so many people in such a spirit of openness.

The programs for this month’s concerts celebrate this call to listen, learn and act. We have two composers whose works make clear what Dvořák called out long ago: that American music should embrace and be influenced by the experience and expression found in the Black experience and that it should guide and shape the creation of American music. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, one of the jewels of 20th century American music, should be far better known and we are excited to include his Sinfonietta for Strings in our programming. In addition, on the same program we present Rounds for Piano and string orchestra by the wonderful young composer of our own time, Jessie Montgomery, whose energy, humor, political commitment and blazing curiosity about the rest of the world, embody perfectly Beethoven’s proposal, but in a language of now.

On the same program we have Prokofiev’s first symphony written 100 years ago in revolutionary Russia, trying to imagine what Haydn, from more than a century before that, might have made of the tumult of a violently changing time. And we have Haydn himself, born in an Eastern European village finding himself in the bustling and cacophonous city of London. In this Symphony No. 104 (the last of his “London” Symphonies) he interweaves the wild shouts of English street-traders with the beautiful Croatian folk-tunes of his childhood.

And, in our first concert back at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park with our beloved music director Rafael Payare, we have Debussy, dreaming like a sleepy schoolboy of Ancient Greece; and one of Mahler’s most beautiful and accessible symphonies, a huge panorama of the composer’s life and native land, with scraps of Jewish music, Hungarian music, Romany music, Bohemian music, gorgeous Viennese waltzes and love-songs… and at the end we find one of the most beautiful depictions of childhood in the whole of classical music, where the singer dreams of an imaginary Heaven, with no more hunger, no more grief.

A whole tapestry of different human experiences and different kinds of musical beauty!

Martha A. Gilmer Chief Executive Officer