Composer Samuel Barber was still on active duty with the U.S. Army Air Corps when in 1944 he was commissioned to write a concerto for Russian ex-patriot cellist Raya Garbousova. The result, his Concerto for Violoncello, is very technically challenging — “pyrotechnic,” even, according to cellist Alisa Weilerstein. As such, it does not get performed often.
But Weilerstein will play it twice this weekend for the Grand Teton Music Festival. The featured soloist will be joined in Friday and Saturday’s “All-American Celebration” program by guest conductor Jader Bignamini of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, who also will lead the Festival Orchestra in works by Gershwin, Bernstein and contemporary American composer Carlos Simon.
…In 2020, [Bignamini] was named the 18th music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, in his first year launching the DSO Digital Concerts series while the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging.
Bignamini also is an avid jazz fan, a love he no doubt will bring to his performances of Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story: Symphonic Dances” and Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture,” a 1947 arrangement of opera highlights by Gershwin’s friend and occasional assistant Robert Russell Bennett.
Also, opening the weekend programs, Bignamini and the Festival Orchestra will perform “Fate Now Conquers” by 37-year-old African American composer Carlos Simon. Alternating between gentle string segments and eruptions of fortissimo with brass and winds, “Fate Now Conquers” was called “propulsive and galvanizing” by the New York Times, a nod to Beethoven “but on [Simon’s] own brazen terms.
