Opening Weekend (September 26-28, 2025)

September 26-28, 2025

Fanfare for the Common Man

Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1

Fanfare for Universal Hope
World Premiere, commissioned by the SLSO

World Premiere, commissioned by the SLSO

Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano
St. Louis Symphony Chorus

Intermission

Erin Schreiber, violin solos

A celebratory occasion calls for a special program. First, a fanfare for our newly renovated hall as we let the trumpets sound—literally. But why stop at one? Today, we present three fanfares from three generations. The Fanfare for the Common Man from 1942 is Aaron Copland’s greatest hit—stirring music with immediate appeal. Nearly half a century later, Joan Tower wrote her response, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, and it, too, has taken on hit status as one of her most frequently performed works. Finally, we give the first performances of a new fanfare for our own time, one in which James Lee III invites us to look to the future and “universal hope.”

To share in the festivities, we’ve invited our friends. Tower is the first of these: former SLSO Music Director Leonard Slatkin heard her first orchestral work in the 1980s and promptly asked her to be Composer in Residence. Meanwhile, the two new pieces on the program are both creations of composers whose work we’ve been commissioning and championing.

With his new song cycle, Kevin Puts (this season’s Composer in Residence) also looks to the future, celebrating Powell Hall as a true “house of tomorrow” with music that’s full of optimism and “big feelings.” House of Tomorrow introduces St. Louis audiences to the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and gives the St. Louis Symphony Chorus a chance to shine.

But a concert hall is, above all, a home for its orchestra, and we’ve chosen one of the most monumental and exhilarating of symphonic works as our finale. A Hero’s Life calls for an orchestra of heroic size: eight horns, not to mention five trumpets (two offstage), two tubas, four each of the woodwind instruments, four percussionists, and two harps, with a 60-piece string section to match. We’re all excited to be back, and delighted you’ve joined us for this magnificent and much-anticipated event!

Despite—or perhaps because of—its popularity, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is seldom performed in formal concerts (this is the kind of piece you’re more likely to hear in Forest Park than Powell Hall). It is better known from television, movies, sport, even politics. For a time the Rolling Stones adopted it as entrance music; it opened the Atlanta Olympics. And yet Copland’s Fanfare began life in a subscription program such as this one.

In August 1942, Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, invited Copland and more than a dozen other composers to write short patriotic fanfares for brass and percussion as “stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.” Most of the composers—who included Walter Piston, Darius Milhaud, Virgil Thomson, and Morton Gould—wrote fanfares for Freedom, Liberty, Paratroopers, and the Signal Corps, among others. Copland considered a number of options, including the Spirit of Democracy and Our Heroes, but settled on the Common Man because “it was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”

The fanfare is a demonstration of simplicity and strength. Copland, afraid that new classical music was confounding audiences, felt that it was “worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” The result is a universal musical language based on compelling rhythms, modal harmonies, and open textures. Copland begins in the percussion, a purposeful introduction to the rising trumpet tune, which is gradually amplified through staggered entries from the other brass instruments and layers of harmony. The music conjures up a spirit of pioneering resolve and an egalitarian character that belies the apparent discrimination of its mid-century title.

Yvonne Frindle © 2000/2025

Joan Tower’s first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman is in many ways a response to the Fanfare for the Common Man. The choice of title is an obvious reference, and Tower adopts a nearly identical instrumentation. The strength of the music, its brevity and its uplifting character provide further parallels with Copland’s Fanfare.

But for all its deference to Copland, Tower’s Fanfare is as personal and distinctive as you’d expect from music 44 years younger. It is more intricate and detailed, and unlike the Copland, it features rapidly changing meters and many fast-moving notes for the brass and percussion. Tower’s elaborate and colorful percussion section (Copland calls only for bass drum and tam-tam) points to the importance she places on this aspect of the music. Indeed, some of the most virtuosic moments in the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman belong to the timpanist.

Tower’s Fanfare begins with bass drum and timpani, bringing to mind the Copland, but it immediately takes its own course. The expected ascending tune in the trumpets is presented in a series of filigree trills above sustained horns—more expectant than majestic. Nobility enters with the trombones, while the horns paint what has been described as a Copland-esque “open sky” mood. The music becomes increasingly agitated and more rhythmically complex as it builds to a climax and the abruptly triumphant conclusion.

About the composer

Composer and pianist Joan Tower studied composition at Columbia University but thinks of herself as a “self-taught” composer because everything she “learned about writing music that was meaningful
came from writing and hearing it.” To this could be added “playing it,” since she was the founding pianist of the Da Capo Chamber Players for 15 years, promoting contemporary music through composition and performance. She is regarded as one of the most successful female composers of all time, acclaimed for the energy of her music, which
has been performed worldwide.

Tower came to orchestral composition relatively late, and her first symphonic work was the vigorous and imaginative Sequoia, written for the American Composers Orchestra in 1981. Her compositions
since then include a piano concerto (Homage to Beethoven, reflecting one of her musical influences), the cello concerto A New Day, and the Grawemeyer Award-winning Silver Ladders, composed for the SLSO when she was Composer in Residence in the 1980s. Her romping chamber work Petroushskates points to another important musical influence, Stravinsky.

Yvonne Frindle © 2000/2025

Fanfare for Universal Hope is one of seven works by James Lee III that will receive world premieres in concert halls throughout the United States during the 2025/26 season. This SLSO commission in honor of the grand opening of Powell Hall, however, holds special meaning. “Powell Hall is such a beautiful venue for hearing inspirational and transformative music,” says Lee. “It has been a great joy to work with Stéphane Denève and the excellent players of the orchestra, who bring out so wonderfully the essence of the music they perform.”

In Lee’s previous SLSO commission, Visions of Cahokia (2023), the Baltimore-based composer looked to the past for his muse, drawing inspiration from the Native American settlement that thrived just
across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Fanfare for Universal Hope is Lee’s response to our turbulent present. “I was inspired by the current social and political climate of our country and world,” he explains. The piece is infused with the composer’s conviction in the unifying power of music as “a language that connects many people of various ethnicities and cultures.”

True to the genre, Lee’s Fanfare begins with an initial grand flourish, after which it settles into what he describes as “a character of suspenseful anticipation and excitement of a hopeful future.” Rising sustained pitches convey the “idea of ascent” at various points throughout the piece. As the music comes to a climax, the texture immediately is more transparent with a rhythmic focus on the
percussion, strings, and woodwinds. The brass section then returns with an affirming, rising motif, and as the music progresses, the texture grows in density and the celebratory nature of the work continues with an explosive, jubilant ending.

About the composer

Born in Michigan and raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, James Lee III takes inspiration from faith, history, and his proficiency in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew. He holds degrees in piano performance and composition from the University of Michigan, and his honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship and the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife Adnéia in Maryland, where he is a professor at Morgan State University.

Lee’s compositions have been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America and have featured on ten recordings. Recent commissions have included works for the Kalamazoo Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, National Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, and New World Symphony orchestras, and his orchestral work Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula, commissioned by the Sphinx Commissioning Consortium, is one of his most performed works, having been taken up by the Chicago and Boston symphony orchestras, as well as the SLSO, among others. Adapted from a conversation with the composer.

Adapted from a conversation with the composer.

Long before receiving the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award, Kevin Puts was a St. Louis kid listening to his grandmother talking about Powell Hall, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Leonard Slatkin. “I never dreamed as an eight-year-old doing my first improvising on the piano that I would be writing music for this storied orchestra,” he says.

This weekend’s performances of House of Tomorrow mark the beginning of Puts’s tenure as the SLSO’s Composer in Residence, and the new relationship represents a natural progression for a composer who already has three SLSO works to his credit. During Stéphane Denève’s tenure as Music Director, the orchestra has commissioned or co-commissioned Silent Night Elegy (2018), Virelai (after Guillaume de Machaut) (2019), and Concerto for Orchestra (2023). In addition, the SLSO has championed Puts’s music, most recently performing his Hymn to the Sun.

“The gift of this important commission is deeply meaningful to me,” Puts says. “I am grateful to the whole SLSO family for believing in my work and entrusting me with creating new music for this milestone in the orchestra’s history.”

House of Tomorrow is brimming with affection for our musical heritage. “Stéphane and I have wonderful talks about the music we love,” Puts says, naming J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion as among his favorite works. He explains how the opening movement, Of Joy and Sorrow, with its sustained woodwind lines floating above quietly undulating strings, leans into the influence of Bach’s oratorios.

Together with a team from the SLSO that included President and CEO Marie-Hélène Bernard, Puts looked to the work of generations of St. Louis poets for inspiration, but ultimately it was the idea of “the
house of tomorrow” from Lebanese American writer Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet that fired his imagination. “I was thinking primarily of celebrating the new Powell Hall and all its exciting renovations—truly
a ‘house of tomorrow’,” he recalls. “But upon reading more of Gibran’s text I found I could go deeper than that.”

The Prophet’s 26 fables center around the dialogues between a group of citizens and the narrator, a wise man named Al Mustafa. Puts found this framework conducive to writing for a mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra. “I could imagine these entreaties sung by the chorus, to whom the soloist—acting as the prophet—would respond,” he says. “The chorus could then repeat the words and fragments of the prophet’s responses in counterpoint with the soloist, as if reflecting on their wisdom.”

The mezzo-soprano in question is Joyce DiDonato, who makes her SLSO debut with these concerts. House of Tomorrow is the fourth work Puts has written for DiDonato, following the acclaimed opera The Hours (given its stage premiere in 2022 by the Metropolitan Opera) and its “preview” work She May Pick Up Her Pen, and most recently, the song cycle Emily – No Prisoner Be, which was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and premiered just last month in Bregenz with the trio Time for Three. Puts said he is “deeply privileged to know and work with” DiDonato, and hopes House of Tomorrow will be “a vehicle for her extraordinary talents as a performer and interpreter.”

The text of House of Tomorrow addresses Gibran’s themes, ranging from youth, longing, and joy to sorrow, pain, and grief. Puts hopes audiences will find resonance in the work’s considerations of the
human condition, but adds that the “exquisite poetry” of Gibran’s text infused him with a sense of “wonder and optimism” that enabled him to write the music he wanted to create. “I think I am most excited simply to share with our audience the musical journey of the piece, one which I hope flows organically from beginning to end in a rather cyclical way,” he says. “When I write music, it comes
from a place of sincere emotion, of big feelings, and I look forward to sharing it with the audience through these amazing performers.”

About the composer

Kevin Puts won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his opera Silent Night and the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Contact, his concerto for two violins and double bass, and in 2024 he was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year.

His music has been commissioned and performed by organizations including the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, and Minnesota Opera, as well as the SLSO, and he has collaborated with leading soloists such as Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Joshua Bell. In 2022, his fourth opera, The Hours, received its concert premiere in Philadelphia, followed by a triumphant stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Its revival in 2024 marked the first instance in the Metropolitan’s history of a work returning the season after its premiere.

Adapted from a conversation with the composer.

The concept of the artist as hero was one of the central tenets of the Romantic movement, and its expression is a recurring theme in 19th-century music. Beethoven established the model that would
be followed by subsequent composers, using music to build dramas of struggle and eventual triumph, most notably in his Third, Fifth, and Ninth symphonies. These compositions exerted a tremendous
influence, and throughout the 19th century, the most ambitious composers sought to emulate Beethoven’s example, adopting something of his heroic manner and writing orchestral works with thinly veiled autobiographical programs. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony constitute particularly famous, but by no means isolated, examples of this practice.

Aside from the music they created, musicians provided the Romantic era with its most vivid examples of the artist-hero. Again, it was Beethoven—overcoming deafness and other hardships by dint of genius and perseverance—who provided a model for this new archetype. Hardly less inspiring, at least to their admirers, were those composers who struggled to assert their progressive artistic ideals against a hostile, conservative public: crusaders like Berlioz, Bruckner, and Wagner. And the artist-hero found yet another manifestation in the careers of virtuoso performers such as the pianist Liszt and violinist Paganini, whose feats on the concert stage conquered audiences to a degree matched only by rock stars of our own time.

As the Romantic movement reached its culmination, the notion of the artist-hero received ever more extravagant musical expression. Wagner’s operatic alter-ego Siegfried and Mahler’s admittedly
autobiographical First Symphony are notable in this regard. But the most unambiguous assertion of the concept came with Richard Strauss’s epic orchestral piece Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life).

Written in 1898, Ein Heldenleben was the last of a remarkable series of tone poems Strauss composed during the final decades of the 19th century. Several of those works, particularly Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), already had implied certain types of heroic figures and actions. But Strauss left nothing implicit about the heroic theme of Ein Heldenleben, nor about the identity of the hero whose story its music relates—or so it seemed to the work’s earliest critics. They immediately condemned the composition as a blatant and immodest piece of self-aggrandizement, even though the composer provided no written program other than the titles of six sections.

Faced with this criticism, Strauss attempted to give a more general interpretation of the piece. “It is enough to know there is a hero,” he said, “fighting his enemies.” The music, however, offered rather conclusive evidence that Strauss indeed fancied himself the title figure: musical quotations from his own earlier compositions are presented as emblems of “the hero’s works of peace” in the work’s fifth section.

From our present perspective, it seems hardly important whether or not the composer was waving his own flag. Strauss was a controversial artist, a radical composer in his day, and he had suffered numerous critical slings and arrows. If Ein Heldenleben is a fantasy of self-vindication, it is hardly more offensive than Wagner’s conquest of his critics in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which the humble but true musician trumps his pedantic rival in a climactic singing contest and wins the girl each desires. Moreover, it is a sentiment easy to identify with. Who, after all, has not indulged in heroic fantasies?

Ein Heldenleben unfolds in six broad sections, played without pause. The first introduces the hero of the work’s title in a soaring romantic melody. In the second part, Strauss depicts the hero’s enemies through carping woodwind figures and malevolent harmonies in the low strings. But the hero also has a soul-mate, a Beloved, or Companion, represented in radiant passages for solo violin in the third section. The fourth portion of the tone poem finds the hero confronted by his enemies in some of the most colorful battle music ever composed. Emerging victorious, he now devotes himself to peaceful works for the benefit of humanity. Quotations from Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Death and Transfiguration, and several other Strauss compositions sound in this fifth section. Finally, his life’s work accomplished, the hero withdraws from the world, serene in the knowledge of his virtues and accomplishments.

Adapted from a note by Paul Schiavo © 2013

Multi-Grammy Award winner and 2018 Olivier Award winner for Outstanding Achievement in Opera, Kansas-born Joyce DiDonato entrances audiences across the globe—acclaimed as a performer and producer, and a fierce advocate for the arts. With a concert and stage repertoire spanning four centuries, a much-praised discography, and industry-leading projects, she has defined what it is to be a singer in the 21st century. These concerts mark her SLSO debut.

In August at the Bregenz Festival, she premiered Emily – No Prisoner Be, a song cycle by Kevin Puts on poetry by Emily Dickinson. Other recent highlights include a return to Teatro Real Madrid for Handel’s Theodora and a European recital tour, her continued musical partnership with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and debut appearances with the London Philharmonic and Norwegian National Opera orchestras. She also premiered Rachel Portman’s song cycle Another Eve (Konzerthaus Dortmund) and after a ground-breaking three years, completed her global touring project EDEN, which reached more than 15 million people.

In 2025/26, her schedule includes season opening concerts for the Minnesota Orchestra and Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain, as well as for the SLSO. She returns to Musikkollegium Winterthur for Another Eve, collaborates with Radio France for Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, reunites with pianist Craig Terry for recitals in Geneva and Tokyo, and
embarks on an Australasian tour with concerts for the Melbourne, Tasmanian, and New Zealand symphony orchestras. In the United States, she will make her Lincoln Center stage debut as the Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors, and a much-anticipated role debut in Saariaho’s Innocence (Metropolitan Opera). Concert appearances will include Mahler with Nézet-Séguin: Symphony No. 2 (Philadelphia Orchestra) and Symphony No. 3 (Berlin Philharmonic). She will tour her album Songplay throughout Asia and will join the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra on a European tour following a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

Director of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus; AT&T Foundation Chair

A versatile and engaging artist, conductor Erin Freeman was named Director of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus in July 2024. She also serves in positions throughout the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia, and maintains an international presence through guest conducting. She is Artistic Director of the City Choir of Washington and Wintergreen Music, and Principal Conductor of the Richmond Ballet (State Ballet of Virginia), and recent positions include Director of the award-winning Richmond Symphony Chorus and Director of Choral Activities at Virginia Commonwealth University and George Washington University.

In addition to directing the St. Louis Symphony Chorus, recent performance highlights have included concerts at Brazil’s Sala São Paulo with the City Choir of Washington and Brazilian Mozarteum Academic Orchestra, productions for Washington Ballet and Richmond Ballet (Carmina Burana for her debut at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts), and her New York City Ballet debut (George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker).

Guest conducting engagements include concerts with the Toledo, Detroit, Portland (Maine), and Virginia symphony orchestras; Charlottesville Symphony; Buffalo and Savannah philharmonic orchestras; and Berkshire Choral International (at the Vienna Musikverein). She has also conducted at Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, Cadogan Hall, Lincoln Center, La Madeleine in Paris, and the Kennedy Center, and has led and/or prepared the Richmond Symphony Chorus for multiple recordings, including the 2019 Grammy-nominated release of Children of Adam by Mason Bates.

In the 2025/26 season she will conduct productions of Nutcracker and Giselle (Richmond Ballet) and Coppélia (Toledo Ballet), a concert performance of The Music Man (City Choir of Washington and the Washington National Opera Orchestra), and a performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor in Washington’s historic National Presbyterian Church.