Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: American Panorama

With an annual residency at the Harris since 2012, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) is one of the theater’s longest-standing artistic partners. CMS opens the 2023-24 season with a program celebrating beautiful and uplifting music, including Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite for 13 players and featuring CMS Co-Artistic Directors David Finckel and Wu Han.
The United States of America maintains its identity as the world’s quintessential melting pot, just about everyone and everything we know having roots elsewhere. CMS’s American Panorama program illustrates this phenomenon in music unmistakably American in spirit yet diverse in dialect, each composer having drawn from distinct sources: Harry T. Burleigh from his African-American heritage; Antonín Dvořák from his exposure to Native-American and African-American music combined with his innate Czech sensibility; Arthur Foote, a leading 19th-century composer who, as a member of the Boston Six, forged a uniquely American sound clothed in European traditions; and Aaron Copland, whose intensive studies in Paris afforded him the technique to express the flavor of America as no other.