Celebrate one of the foremost names in American music with this Leonard Bernstein extravaganza!

Composed at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy for the inauguration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, Bernstein later arranged his Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers for cello and piano.

Written at age 24, Bernstein’s First Symphony premiered in 1944 and was named by the New York Music Critics Circle as the best new work of the year. According to conductor Christoph Eschenbach, a close friend of Bernstein’s, “Jeremiah is a statement by an anxious, troubled soul. Bernstein was very well aware of what was going on in Europe in 1942, that people—the Jews—were victims of a horrible, deadly kind of paganism.… And I think of it also as a warning for what is happening today…that has meaning for all of us in a climate too often marked by racial intolerance and xenophobia…”

Aspen alumnus and renowned violinist Robert McDuffie will join the Chamber Symphony for Bernstein’s Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium, inspired by the composer’s reading of Plato’s dialogue—each one made by a distinguished speaker—of related statements in praise of love.

The program will also feature An American Song, a composition by AMFS Munroe President and CEO Alan Fletcher. He writes, “The music is painted in the simple glowing colors of American singing. Layering onto the score in a series of thin translucent glazes. The rhythms and meters float subtly free, placed so that coincidence makes for happy accidents. This is an American process of free association.”

BERNSTEIN: Three Meditations from Mass
BERNSTEIN: Symphony No. 1, “Jeremiah”
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ALAN FLETCHER: An American Song
BERNSTEIN: Serenade, after Plato‘s Symposium