Festival Orchestra

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.

Edvard Grieg wrote his Piano Concerto in A minor at the young age of 24, and it’s no wonder it’s his only one–it’s about as close to perfection as a concerto can get. From the thunderous opening, to the many lyrical melodies in the first movement, the heartbreakingly beautiful second movement, and the joyful and thrilling third, it’s a tour de force from start to finish. The program opens with Gabriela Ortiz’s Antrópolis, a piece inspired by the music of Mexico’s nightlife, rich with rhythms and melodies from bars, nightclubs, and dance halls.