Festival Orchestra

Sun Valley favorites Time for Three return to the Pavilion stage for the first time since August 2017. They’ll perform a new work titled Contact, which was co-commissioned by the Festival and written for them by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts. Puts wrote Hymn to the Sun for the Sun Valley Pavilion’s opening concert. The program begins with Three Latin American Dances for Orchestra, by Gabriela Lena Frank. Frank is a Grammy-nominated composer and pianist, who was named one of the top 35 female composers in classical music by The Washington Post.

After the traditional Pops Night salute to the Armed forces, guest conductor Andy Einhorn will lead the Festival Orchestra and two Broadway singers in an evening of The Best of Americana, featuring familiar and fun works from film, Broadway, and much-loved composers. Einhorn, whose recording and tour credits include Bullets Over Broadway, Evita, Sondheim on Sondheim, and Elton John’s The Lion King, is also familiar to local audiences as the pianist who accompanied Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, and Brian Stokes Mitchell for the Festival’s virtual Gala Concert in 2020. Following the concert, enjoy a lively performance on the Pavilion lawn for the Festival’s third Lawn Party. Bring your friends and your dancing shoes!

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!

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.