Program: Stravinsky – Feux d’artifice Webern – Im Sommerwind Saariaho – Aile du Songe Grace-Evangeline Mason – Ablaze the Moon Strauss – Der Rosenkavalier Suite
A study in orchestral color and transformation, this program opens with the glittering brilliance of Stravinsky’s Feux d’artifice—a dazzling early work that helped spark his collaboration with Diaghilev—alongside the lush, pastoral lyricism of Webern’s Im Sommerwind. The sound world deepens in Saariaho’s Aile du songe, a luminous flute concerto performed by Claire Chase that explores the connection between the earthly and the spiritual. After intermission, poetry and nostalgia come to the fore in Grace-Evangeline Mason’s Ablaze the Moon, before culminating in the elegance and Viennese charm of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite.
