Caroline Shaw’s The Observatory was inspired by a hike up to the Griffith Observatory outside of Los Angeles. In the composer’s words, “I looked down at the city with all its curving road patterns, and up at the sky, which has been observed and wondered about since the beginning of consciousness…There was something about writing for a full symphony orchestra that had made me think about sci-fi films. I love the way epic tales of the beyond can zoom in and out, using imagined alternative universes to tell stories about ourselves on multiple scales at once. And I love how music in these films carves and colors our attention to those worlds (in their various permutations).”

In Mixed Messages, Nico Muhly, best known for his opera Two Boys which was performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the composer tries to evoke the contradictory communications a person can convey simultaneously. As Muhly says, “‘mixed messages’ is a phrase you hear applied to any number of interpersonal encounters from the strictly business to the romantic.”

Schumann’s Second Symphony brings the concert to a stirring finale. Other than its orchestration, it was written in a mere three weeks, right after Schumann emerged from a physical and mental health crisis. After this brief reprieve, his problems returned, and a constant ringing and roaring in his ears forced him to take a break from the orchestration. In spite of Schumann’s expectation that his illness would be apparent to listeners, the work is dominated by a spirit of affirmation and triumph.

The run time for this performance is 1 hour 30 minutes.