To enhance the audience experience, this event features performance imagery screens on both sides of the stage. To learn more, click here.

This concert will be carried live on Aspen Public Radio! Tune in 91.5FM and 88.9FM or at aspenpublicradio.org.

The season’s final concert celebrates America’s 250th anniversary with a Leonard Bernstein masterpiece and culminates with a work that has been universally embraced as a beacon of hope and unity.

In December 1963, Bernstein was asked to compose a piece for the Cathedral of Chichester’s 1965 music festival using texts from the Psalms. From its premiere to the present day, Chichester Psalms has stirred audiences with its unique synthesis of biblical Hebrew verse and Christian choral tradition, expressing the composer’s deeply felt aspirations for peace and brotherhood.

Since his early twenties, Beethoven had wanted to write music for Schiller’s Ode to Joy, a glorified drinking song with a strong humanistic message. It had been ten years since he’d composed a symphony, and he was anxious to get on paper all the ideas that had been percolating in his imagination for thirty years.