“Take Me Home” ends our season in celebratory fashion as we look at the many ways we can define “home.”
We open with Antonio Estévez’s Melodia en el Llano, a work chosen through our “players’ choice” program, where musicians of the WSO select a piece for performance that is special to their musical story. Our principal second violin, Juan Jaramillo, offered this piece as a tribute to his homeland of Venezuela.
Our second piece on the program is a WSO-commissioned work from composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), featuring yet another innovative artist: Tracy Silverman. One of the world’s foremost electric violin soloists, some of the world’s great composers have written concertos for Tracy—and we are honored to bring together these two innovative icons for this premiere.
In the second half of the concert, we return to a different sort of new American work, with the iconic “New World Symphony,” by Antonín Dvořák. Throughout this masterpiece, Dvořák uses influences that he encountered after he moved to New York—most notably, the spiritual—to help shape the sound of a new type of American classical music.
