Musical Mediums: Pictures at an Exhibition

Great art begets great music in this program of works inspired by poetry, prose, and paintings conducted by Maestro Piotr Gajewski. George Walker’s Lilacs puts to magnificent music the words of Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Soprano Talise Trevigne invigorates this Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for solo soprano and orchestra. Cellist Zuill Bailey returns to the NatPhil stage for Tales of Hemingway. He won a Grammy for Best Solo Performance in 2017 for this four-movement reimagining of the works of Ernest Hemingway.

From words to watercolors, the program ends with Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, arranged by Maurice Ravel. Inspired by an exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Viktor Hartmann, Pictures at an Exhibition moves audiences through a musical story, inviting listeners to let their imaginations run wild through Mussorgsky’s sonic landscape.