The New Haven Symphony Orchestra and Music Director William Boughton are proud to announce the concerts and programs for the 2015 – 16 concert season. Featured guest artists will include Benjamin Beilman, Nick van Bloss, Michael Brown, Chris Brubeck, Debbie Gravitte, Tessa Lark, and Worcester Chorus, and Hannah Lash as the newest two-year Composer-In-Residence.
Beginning October 1 with a “Northern Lights Festival” that celebrates Scandinavian composers, the 2015 – 16 year will feature a melding of new and old traditions for the NHSO, currently wrapping up its 121st season in the Elm City. These will include not only concerts at the Symphony’s home venues in New Haven and nearby Connecticut communities — Woolsey Hall, the Shubert Theater, and pops programs in Hamden and Shelton — but will also expand the orchestra’s reach to Essex, Middletown, Wilton, and Worcester, MA, feature three “New Generation Artists,” have principal clarinetist David Shifrin and principal oboist Olav van Hezewijk soloing at concerts, bring the seventies back in style, and more.
“If the Orchestra’s 2015 – 16 Season has one overriding theme it’s the power of music, whether that be in the hands of Jean Sibelius at our Northern Lights Festival in October, who instigated revolution and changed his homeland of Finland forever, or the music of John Williams at the Shubert in June 2016, which heightens and deepens the emotions of all those wonderful movies. (Who didn’t cry at the end of E.T.?)” Boughton said in a recent press release for the season.
“Music comforts but also stimulates and provokes us to feel in ways that the other arts cannot. Our April concert at the Shubert includes African American spirituals, which conveyed hidden messages to those on the Underground Railroad whilst providing the strength to keep going. Nick van Bloss, who will join us in February for Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, suffers from Tourette Syndrome but when he’s making music his symptoms disappear. Again and again this season we will see music expressing that which words cannot.”
Courtesy New Haven Symphony Orchestra
A New Voice in Town
A big part of music expressing that which words cannot is the NHSO’s two year journey with Hannah Lash as she composes her newest and most monumental work, a complete symphony based on the mysterious Voynich manuscript housed in Yale’s Beinecke Library.
The Voynich Project’s defining feature will be the involvement and partnership of the Greater New Haven community and music lovers connected electronically across the globe in the working process and creation of this commission. Throughout the composition process, Lash will write and video record her progress on the piece and walk the New Haven community through the creation of this brand new work. The NHSO will premiere each of the four movements over the course of two seasons, with the first movement, “Herbal,” premiered on October 1, 2015, and the second movement, “Astronomical,” premiered on May 19, 2016.
Courtesy New Haven Symphony Orchestra
For a more robust schedule of forthcoming events, click here.
