RPO 2608 Air dates: August 3 & November 23
LOWELL LIEBERMANN The Second Coming for Soprano and Orchestra (WORLD PREMIERE)*
Jasmine Habersham, soprano
ROBERT SCHUMANN Piano Concerto,
Yefim Bronfman, piano
GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 4
Jasmine Habersham, soprano
Yefim Bronfman brings Schumann’s Piano Concerto to life with breathtaking passion and poetry. Soprano Jasmine Habersham lends her voice to a world premiere by Lowell Liebermann (a Voices of Today commission) and later returns in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.
*With poetry by William Butler Yeats, for Andreas Delfs, commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Broadcast of RPO Concerts on WXXI Classical is made possible by a grant from Dr. Ralph Jozefowicz, honoring classical music in Rochester.
