Lang Lang‘s „New York Rhapsody“ is a love letter to the city he considers his adoptive home, set to the music that helped make this city so famous and performed at one of New York‘s most iconic venues, Lincoln Center. The one-night-only show embraces a wide range of musical styles and voices capturing New York‘s magic, from Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Danny Elfman to Lou Reed, Alicia Keys, and Don Henley, including a rare performance of the original 1924 jazz band arrangement of George Gershwin‘s “Rhapsody in Blue”. Joining Lang Lang are celebrated artists such as Rufus Wainwright, Suzanne Vega, Kurt Elling, Regina Spector, Jerry Douglas, and rising stars including Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day, genre-bending violinist Lindsey Stirling, and Grammy-winning trumpeter Sean Jones, in addition to a 30-piece orchestra with musical direction by David Lai.
The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood
The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood spotlights Bernstein’s wide-ranging talents as a composer, his many gifts as a great interpreter and champion of other composers, and his role as an inspirer of a new generation of musicians and music lovers across the country and around the globe. The gala concert features a kaleidoscopic array of artists from the worlds of classical music, film, and Broadway. The entire first half of the program is dedicated to selections from such brilliant Bernstein works as Candide, West Side Story, Mass, and Serenade. Music from the classical canon very dear to Bernstein’s heart-selections from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and music by Copland – plus a new work by John Williams, makes up a good portion of the program’s second half; the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony No. 2 brings the program to a dramatic close. 141 mins (including Bernstein at Tanglewood film + Video Greetings) /
127 mins (concert version only)
Tanglewood Festival 2021 – A.S. Mutter & John Williams
C Major is delighted to present the world premiere performance of John Williams’ Violin Concerto No.2 from the Tanglewood Festival. Williams himself conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the soloist is the work’s dedicatee, Anne-Sophie Mutter. The legendary composer and superstar violinist are old friends and have enjoyed worldwide success together in recent years. Providing an explosive opening to the concert is American composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst (2012) for string orchestra, full of fiery colours and energy and conducted by the BSO’s Music Director Andris Nelsons. He returns to the stage after the Violin Concerto for Copland’s Quiet City, a score that began life as incidental music for a play of the same name, but found fame as a standalone concert piece. With haunting solo parts for trumpet and English horn, this reflective work paints an atmospheric portrait of a city by night. The programme ends with the suite Stravinsky put together in 1919 from his ballet The Firebird, triumphantly premiered in Paris in 1910. PROGRAM Williams: Violin Concerto No. 2 & Across the Stars; Montgomery: Starburst; Copland: Quiet City; Stravinsky: Suite from The Firebird