John Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls
January 17, 2009 at 8pm at Heinz Hall
With Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, John Adams conducting
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This one-time performance is one of the highlights of the season, and indeed, will be unique in the history of the Mendelssohn Choir. John Adams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, honoring those affected by the September 11, 2001 attacks, is one of the most moving modern compositions in American music. John Adams himself will be at the podium, with the full forces of the Mendelssohn Choir, the Children’s Festival Chorus and the Pittsburgh Symphony.
Composed in just six months, On the Transmigration of Souls was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in January 2002 as a response to the violent acts of 9/11. The piece, which Adams calls a “memory space” rather than a requiem, is a spiritually moving evocation of a city in crisis during an unfolding tragedy. The music beckons us to move through the pain of loss, as we revisit the disaster unique to modern Americans.
Maestro Adams opens the evening with Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem, a work for full orchestra written in 1940 when the ardently anti-war composer was responding to the threat of world war. Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony is a fitting finale for this concert of modern masterpieces. The symphony is based on music from the eponymous opera, depicting Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer in the days and hours before the first atomic bomb explosion at Los Alamos in 1945.
Join us for an intensely personal night in which we will experience and observe music’s ability to transcend war and its consequences.