The Symphony Concert of our Music Director
James' Choice
Symphony Concert
As a New Yorker by birth and Berliner by choice, Music Director James Gaffigan kicks off the new season with works by European composers in the USA. Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Kurt Weill both had to leave Europe in the early 1930s because of their Jewish roots and found a new artistic home on American shores. Korngold, often mentioned in the same breath as Richard Strauss in his homeland, now devoted himself wholeheartedly to the new genre of film music, thereby becoming one of Hollywood’s defining figures.
Meanwhile, Kurt Weill, having often collaborated with Bertolt Brecht in Berlin, was now dedicating himself entirely to music theatre in New York, becoming a trailblazer in the emerging genre of musicals with works such as Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus.
But even at the turn of the century, great composers were already being drawn across the Atlantic. It was there that Antonín Dvořák composed not only his famous New World Symphony (No. 9), but also his equally extraordinary American Suite. Gustav Mahler likewise composed his Tenth Symphony in New York, as his final, unfinished work, thereby writing music history.
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