Summer concert

Themes of love and loss feature strongly in this program featuring mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. First up are a pair of songs Brahms wrote for his friends, the great violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife, Amalie, hoping to bolster their rocky marriage. Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle then depicts the distress of an abandoned woman, evoking memories of happy love, nostalgia, and anguish. Concluding the program, Cooke will sing Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”). Berlioz put six poems about unrequited love to music, creating a song cycle. It’s a musical form Mahler would employ several decades later in his Rückert Lieder, which Cooke will sing in the following 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.