Corigliano and Norman Gen X Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall

John Corigliano long resisted writing a symphony, seeing it as a form that served a composers ego over the audience and performers. At the height of the AIDS crisis, Corigiliano overcame that hesitation and wrote his Symphony No. 1 as a way to memorialize friends lost to the epidemic. Though he was a member of the so-called Silent Generation, Coriglianos symphony served as influential composition for those coming of age in symphonic circles when it premiered in 1990. In this Gen X program curated by Thomas Ads, the milestone Symphony No. 1 is paired with music by Andrew Norman and Jonathan Bailey Holland.