Van Zweden Conducts Ives, John Adams & Brahms
Making waves in his inaugural year as the New York Philharmonic's new artistic director, Jaap Van Zweden continues his groundbreaking 2018/19 season with a program of Ives, John Adams and Brahms. The evening begins with American modernist composer Charles Ives' Central Park In The Dark, an abstract picture-in-sounds piece for chamber orchestra that reimagines what the movements of man and nature would have sounded like in a time before the combustion engine and radio.
NY Phil Artist-In-Residence Matthias Goerne will then join the ensemble for a soul-stirring rendition of John Adams' The Wound Dresser, a profoundly moving 19-minute work set to excerpts of Walt Whitman's heart-rending and unflinching poem wherein the narrator tends to those wounded in war. Brahms First Symphony closes the evening in a whirlwind of intricate yet soaring orchestration. Widely considered to be the composers masterwork, the piece reflects the kaleidoscopic awe and wonder of a Bach fugue as well as the energy and dynamism of a large scale epic.