Season Preview
TheSpirit
Season
of the
In 2014–2015, Marin Alsop will conduct music that
embraces spirituality, while exploring some old favorites.
T
he Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s 2014 –2015 season
opens with friends — old and
not-so-old. Native daughter
Hilary Hahn, who made her
debut with the BSO when she
was 12 years old, will return to
play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, written some 173 years
before her birth. For the first program of the
new season, BSO Music Director Marin Alsop will also conduct Mahler’s Symphony
No. 4 (Sept. 19 & 21).
One of two works by the composer
scheduled in 2014–2015, Mahler’s Fourth
is a telling taste of what the season holds.
The fourth movement opens with a childlike soprano voice singing “Das himmlische
Leben” (The Heavenly Life), a child’s view
of heaven. “The overarching theme of the
season is spirituality,” says Alsop.
Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral, in
its BSO premiere, along with John Williams’ Theme from Schindler’s List (Sept.
26 & 28), is a modern take on that theme.
Higdon describes her piece as “a story that
commemorates living and passing through
places of knowledge and of sharing and of
that song called life.”
Rapture, by another contemporary
composer, Baltimore native Christopher
Rouse, will share the bill with Alexander
Scriabin’s Symphonic early 20th century
Poem of Ecstasy and Richard Strauss’s
8 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Ein Heldenleben, “A Hero’s Life,” for
an evening that explores heroism as it
transcends mortal limitations.
Both Higdon and Rouse are familiar
to BSO audiences. “The BSO has a longstanding comm ]Y[