Stéphane Denève will begin his tenure as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with a free concert at Art Hill in Forest Park on September 12. Members of the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus, St. Louis Symphony Chorus, and St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra will join the SLSO for the program, which will include selections from John Williams’s Star Wars score; W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues March;” Bernstein’s Candide Overture and “Mambo” from West Side Story; and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Denève’s first two weekends of concerts at Powell Hall will be an all-John Williams program and a “Bienvenue, Stéphane” program that will feature the world premiere of Kevin Puts’s Virelai after Guillaume de Machaut along with Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral, Debussy’s La Mer, Guillaume Connesson’s The Shining One, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with pianist Jean-Yves Thibauet, and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Also planned in 2019-20 are the premieres of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Venit Illuminatio, and Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini), a co-commission with four other orchestras featuring variations by multiple contemporary composers.
Posted September 11, 2019
Stéphane Denève photo by Geneviève Caron
