2nd Subscription Concert

The Second Subscription concert offers three works by major composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Czech National Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Steven Mercurio, with soprano Golda Zahra as soloist.

The evening opens with Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a captivating work for soprano and orchestra set to a text by the American writer and journalist James Agee, evoking a memory of a summer evening from his childhood. Next comes Tchaikovsky’s dramatic symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, drawn from the tragic story of doomed love told in Canto V of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The evening closes with Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor—a work the composer laboured over for many years, distinguished by its rich melodic writing, tension, and unmistakably Brahmsian style.