Composer Sarah Gibson addresses the audience at the world premiere of her new work with the Sarasota Orchestra and conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. Photo courtesy of Sarasota Orchestra.
“The final concert program of the Sarasota Orchestra’s Masterworks season took the audience on an expansive journey” led by Carlos Miguel Prieto, writes Gayle Williams in Saturday’s (4/1) Sarasota Herald-Tribune (subscription required). “Gil Shaham was joy incarnate Friday night … performing the rhapsodic Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 by Erich Korngold…. A world premiere is always a highlight and the program introduced us to composer Sarah Gibson with ‘to make this mountain taller.’… She stands firmly as a composer of note with plenty of work, including this commission from the League of American Orchestras and its new Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program…. Inspired by her own feelings on the day that Roe v Wade was overturned last year, Gibson drew on images of women scaling the many mountains over the centuries only to find there are still more to tackle. Using the full orchestra, Gibson does not shy away from altering the sound and using extended techniques to create the world she imagined…. I was moved nearly to tears by the impression of squelched voices … The voices clearly struggled against forces from every side and eventually broke through for glorious moments and clear vistas.” The program also included Richard Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben.”
