Hosts
Michael Stern
Dan Margolies
Program
Passacaglia, Op. 1
by Anton Von Webern
Jun Märkl, guest conductor
Live performance, February 2017
Fancy Free
by Leonard Bernstein
Live performance, January 2016
"Fancy Free" is the work that inspired the next collaboration between Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins, namely their hit Broadway musical "On the Town." And of course the pair went on to collaborate on another Broadway hit called "West Side Story." Michael Stern believes the work shows Bernstein at his "creative best," adding that "it was written by a 26 year old who was actually living that experience — living in New York City, during wartime and feeling all of the energy of the city."
Symphony No. 7 in E Major (1883)
by Anton Bruckner
Live performance, October 2019
Bruckner wrote this towering work between 1881 and 1883, and revised it in 1885. It marked his first real public triumph and brought fame, perhaps unwanted, to this modest and diffident man. Michael Stern finds it impossible to separate Bruckner's music from his devout Catholicism, and says that "his music is like the construction of a massive cathedral. You're building a piece of music block by block, stone by stone, and erecting this massive structure which stands proudly and triumphantly at the end of that journey."
