Summer concert

One of classical music’s great mysteries is why Schubert never finished his eighth symphony—he lived six more years after he stopped working on it. But there’s no mystery in why it has become so popular: it’s gorgeous, and it includes one of the most famous melodies ever written. Like Schubert, Gustav Mahler was a master songwriter, and he set many poems by Friedrich Rückert to music. Sasha Cooke, a “luminous standout” (The New York Times) with “equal parts poise, radiance, and elegant directness” (Opera News), sings Mahler’s Rückert Lieder with the Festival Orchestra.

Stéphane Denève is Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the recently appointed Artistic Director of the New World Symphony. He’s thrilled to join the Festival Orchestra for an evening of greatest hits from John Williams’s vast catalog of film music.

Bronfman, a “marvel of digital dexterity, warmly romantic sentiment, and jaw-dropping bravura” (Chicago Tribune), returns to Sun Valley to perform Schumann’s only piano concerto. After a wildly successful premiere by his wife, Clara, the piece immediately became known, and loved, for the exquisitely delicate way in which Schumann weaves together equal roles for the pianist and the orchestra. The concert opens with Finlandia, which Jean Sibelius wrote as a patriotic celebration of his homeland in 1900, followed by Threnody (In Memory of Jean Sibelius), which was written in 1965 by U.S. composer William Grant Still in honor of the great composer’s birth 100 years prior. The annual dance party on the lawn will follow this concert.

It’s hard to imagine a piece of classical music causing a riot, but that’s the word often applied to the audience’s reaction when Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring debuted in Paris in 1913. The music (and dancing) broke with tradition so dramatically that it’s often called the first example of modernism in music. As a young man, Stravinsky’s first inspiration to write music for dance came from seeing Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, so it’s fitting that the Festival Orchestra plays some excerpts from that ballet to open this concert.