Saturday, March 30, 2024
7:30 PM
Garde Arts Center, New London

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It is often said that life is a journey. A piece of music, too, is a journey, one that holds up a mirror to life. The ECSO’s March 30 program explores this theme in works by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and the contemporary Sicilian composer Salvatore Di Vittorio, whose 2015 Sea Fanfare, based on a theme by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, who bridged the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, will open the concert.

Mezzo-soprano Ivy Walz, associate dean of Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, where she is a faculty member, will perform Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer. The text for the four bittersweet lieder about lost love was written by Mahler, inspired by the collection of folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn. More music from that romantic decade of the 1880s: the thrilling tone poem Don Juan—about the legendary Spanish seducer who comes to a bad end—written by Richard Strauss in 1888, when he was 24.

The program concludes with Symphony No. 2 in D Major by Johannes Brahms, sometimes called Brahms’s “pastoral” symphony, composed during the summer of 1877 when the composer was enjoying lakeside life in Pörtschach am Worthersee, a village in Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost state.

You can subscribe today to lock in discounts, complimentary vouchers, and the same seats for each concert. The order form is available here, or you can call the ECSO office at 860-443-2876 to discuss seating options.