All-Star Orchestra

Johannes Brahms expressed his own enigmatic motto, “free but happy,” in musical symbols that weave throughout this beautiful, deeply personal symphony – one of the greatest works of German romanticism. The program opens with Hector Berlioz’ witty Shakespearean overture to Beatrice and Benedict.

An unforgettable love-story set in a Vienna of long ago comes alive in Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose), arranged as a symphonic suite by Gerard Schwarz. The spiritual beauty of Barcelona’s towering cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, is evoked by Adolphus Hailstork’s musical meditation Sagrada.

Ottorino Respighi’s great orchestral showpiece “The Pines of Rome” unites nature with the history of Rome, “the Eternal City,” in thrilling tone-pictures. Claude Debussy’s impressionist masterpiece La Mer (“The Sea”) portrays the ever-changing sea in its many moods and colors.

The universal language of music brings together rodeos of Argentinian cowboys in Estancia by Alberto Ginestera, the mythical worlds of Greek and German legends in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and the African celebration of Umoja (“An Anthem of Unity”) by American composer Valerie Coleman.