Nadia Sirota

I have always relished the feeling of being “backstage.” There’s a crazy lovely thing that happens when you get to feel a sort of ownership for a huge historical building or site, be it a concert hall, a cathedral or a museum. When I was a little kid, I spent the summers at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, where my parents taught. This was a Tanglewood more or less unchanged from the days of Koussevitzky, where Bernstein and Copland were to be found eating in the cafeteria, and where Seiji Ozawa could be found zooming around in his sports car.

The symphony has undergone such transformation since it first emerged as a conventional form hundreds of years ago. Concluding Carnegie Hall's Spring for Music festival, Kent Nagano and the Montréal Symphony Orchestra explore the evolution of the symphony beginning with Giovanni Gabrieli's Sacrae Symphoniae for Brass and finishing with Anton Webern's Symphony, Op. 21. This evening, May 14 from 5 to 8pm, Q2 responds with our own take on this large-scale form as it has transformed into the twenty-first century.

This evening, Friday May 13 from 5 to 8 pm, Q2 continues work in tandem with WQXR's Spring for Music broadcast of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's performance with soprano, Dawn Upshaw. In addition to her role as a pedagogue and her career longevity as a singer, we draw inspiration from Upshaw's reputation for forging longstanding relationships with composers who have used her unique voice as their muse.

Artists have often used their art as a means of making sense of the horrors of war and taking a political stance: from Salvador Dalí's painting Face of War to Kryzstof Penderecki's string orchestra work Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. On May 12 as part of Carnegie Hall's Spring for Music Festival, the Oregon Symphony takes the stage and presents a program titled Music for a Time of War featuring cornerstone works by John Adams, Charles Ives, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

Carnegie Hall's Spring for Music festival is designed to allow orchestras to flex their creative programming muscles and provide an outlet to think outside of the overture-concerto-symphony box. On May 11, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra performs Steven Stucky's August, 1964 in their Carnegie Hall debut.

Q2 continues to celebrate Carnegie Hall's Spring for Music Festival with this May 10 program from 5 to 8pm featuring the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory. Though New York City is home to some of the most prestigious American music schools, one should never overlook the fact that a mere one-hundred miles north, in tranquil Annandale-on-Hudson, is a school whose star-studded faculty list includes the likes of Dawn Upshaw, So Percussion, George Tsontakis, Jeremy Denk, David Krakauer, Joan Tower and members of the Guarneri Quartet.