Summer concert

What happens when 16 of the finest horn players in North America get together and try to one-up each other in arrangements of songs ranging from classical to jazz to rock and roll? “It will be the Mother of All Horn Concerts,” says Bill VerMeulen, the Festival’s Principal Horn. Backed by a rhythm section, the masters of horn will deliver a rollicking good time in the Pavilion—don’t miss it!

Richard Strauss’ epic tone poem depicts a day spent hiking in the Alps, from daybreak until nightfall. Through 22 episodes, the audience will experience Strauss’ musical depictions of forests, brooks, a waterfall, meadows, pastures, a glacier, and this Summer Season’s second big storm—recall Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” To produce these sounds, in addition to 16 horns, the orchestra will include an organ, a wind machine, a heckelphone, and a thunder sheet. Where else can you hear this piece in the very setting it describes? Only in Sun Valley!

For opening night, “brilliant pianist” Orli Shaham (The New York Times) returns to Sun Valley to perform Ravel’s beautiful and jazz-influenced Piano Concerto in G Major. Continuing the jazzy theme, the program also includes Delights & Dances, a rhythmic and soulful composition by Academy Award-nominated American composer Michael Abels. The Season opens with The Star-Spangled Banner, of course, followed by Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 stands out for its upbeat enthusiasm, a quality it offers in abundance despite the composer’s advancing deafness when he wrote it. Brimming with extremes and surprises, the piece exhibits an exuberance and cheerfulness not heard again until—perhaps—his Ode to Joy in the ninth symphony. The concert opens with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, a piece he wrote for his wife, Cosima. Wagner hired a small group of musicians to play the piece in the front hallway of his house to awaken her on her birthday morning.