Tapping Into The Twenties at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center

Music Director Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in its debut performance at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, the third of four orchestral concerts in New York City during the ensemble’s 63rd season, on Sunday, March 23 at 3 pm. The afternoon program offers works from the 1920s by John Alden Carpenter, Erwin Schulhoff, and William Grant Still, that demonstrate the influence of jazz on the music of that time period; and a symphonic poem by Edgard Varèse exploring the mysterious and powerful nature of the constellations above. Award-winning pianist and recording artist Orion Weiss, hailed as a “brilliant pianist” by The New York Times, also makes his David Geffen Hall debut at this concert as the featured soloist in Schulhoff’s seldom-heard Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra. 

The ASO’s next concert will be a rare performance of Richard Strauss’ first opera, Guntram, with the Bard Festival Chorale on June 6 at Carnegie Hall. 

Tapping into the Twenties
Sunday, March 23, 2025, at 3 pm, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center
Pre-concert Talk at 2 pm
American Symphony Orchestra
Leon Botstein, conductor
Orion Weiss, piano
John Alden Carpenter: Skyscrapers (1924)
Erwin Schulhoff: Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43 (1923)
Edgard Varèse: Arcana (1925-27)
William Grant Still: Symphony No. 1, Afro-American Symphony (1929-30)
The ASO’s first concert at David Geffen Hall focuses on composers who came of age in the 1920s. Chief among these in the U.S. was Edgar Varèse, whose symphonic poem Arcana was inspired by the topics of alchemy and astrology, and particularly by the writings of 16th-century physician and astrologer Paracelsus.  Varèse dedicated Arcana to Leopold Stokowski, who founded the American Symphony Orchestra and conducted the work’s premiere in 1927. Varèse’s pupil, William Grant Still, found inspiration in the blues and spirituals of Black Americans. In his best-known work, the Afro-American Symphony, Still represents the experiences of the African diaspora, from the sorrows of the past to hope in the future. 

Among the first composers to recognize the expressive potential of jazz in the 1920s was Austro-Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Blending improvisational passages with Neoclassical elements, his 1924 Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra shows the compositional range and versatility of this unjustifiably neglected composer, a leading figure in the “Lost Generation” of Jewish composers who were suppressed and (as was the case with Schulhoff) lost their lives during the Holocaust. The soloist, Orion Weiss, has performed with dozens of orchestras in North America, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic. Another composer who sought to create a distinctly American sound was John Alden Carpenter. His Skycrapers, with its language of jazz and popular tunes, blends seamlessly with the idiom of dissonance and asymmetric rhythms modernized in his time. Like Varèse, Carpenter imaginatively portrays “the many movements and sounds of modern American life.”

Tickets, priced at $25–$65, are available at lincolncenter.org, by calling CarnegieCharge at 212.721.6500, or by visiting the box office at 10 Lincoln Center Plaza.