ADRIAN — After last season’s deep dive into the music of Igor Stravinsky, the Adrian Symphony Orchestra turns its attention this year to an American composer who, like Stravinsky, was an important part of classical music in the 20th century: Aaron Copland.
Five different Copland works are on the schedule for the ASO in 2024-25, beginning with the score to his ballet “Billy the Kid” as part of the Saturday, Oct. 12 season opener. As the season goes on, audiences will also hear “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” “Jubilee Variation” and “Lincoln Portrait.”
The Oct. 12 concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in Adrian College’s Dawson Auditorium. A Classical Conversation about the program, free to all ticketholders, begins at 6:40 p.m. in the auditorium.
Tickets are $39/$33/$25 for adults, $37/$31/$25 for senior citizens, and $20/$17/$13 for students, and are available online at adriansymphony.org; by calling 517-264-3121; at the ASO office in Mahan Hall, Adrian College, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; or at the door beginning two hours before the concert.
To ASO Music Director Bruce Anthony Kiesling, who first heard “Billy the Kid” as a high school student attending the Interlochen Arts Academy and was “bowled over by it,” Copland is singular in his ability to tell a story and evoke a sense of place, in this case the wide-open Western prairies and the legend of the famous outlaw.
Copland wrote the work on commission from Lincoln Kirstein of Ballet Caravan and choreographer Eugene Loring. The resulting one-act ballet premiered on Oct. 16, 1938, at the Civic Opera House in Chicago. A year later, Copland created a suite of music from the ballet, and that is the version that will be most familiar to audience members.
For October’s concert, however, Kiesling and the orchestra will perform the full ballet score, which is somewhat longer and reorders some of the music from the way it appears in the suite.
The concert opens with a work by a composer who will be familiar to previous ASO audiences: Jennifer Higdon, whose piece “blue cathedral” was performed by the orchestra in 2022.
“She’s one of the true superstars in American music today,” Kiesling said, and performing her work is part of the ASO’s multiyear commitment to showcasing women composers.
This time, the orchestra will perform “Peachtree Street,” the last of three movements in a larger work titled “City Scape” that pays homage to Atlanta, Higdon’s hometown. “Peachtree Street” is evocative of not only that specific street, but Atlanta’s bustling streets in general.
Also on the Oct. 12 program is a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring a guest artist who was in Adrian last November to play Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4: Henry Kramer.
The winner of numerous international competitions as well as the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and other honors, Kramer has performed with orchestras across the U.S. and around the world.
He suggested the Rachmaninoff Third for this performance because Kiesling wanted something “meatier” to balance out the rest of the program. And “meatier” certainly describes this concerto: written in 1909 and premiered that November by the composer himself with the New York Symphony Society, the piece is considered one of Rachmaninoff’s most challenging works and, indeed, one of the hardest compositions in the entire piano repertoire.
