Bay Area Rainbow Symphony
Presents
PRIDE Concert with Dawn Harms & Sara Davis Buechner, piano
Saturday, June 10, 2023
7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Caroline Hume Concert Hall
️Dawn Harms, Musical Director
Program
️ *Leonard Bernstein - Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety”
- ️ Soloist: Sara Davis Buechner, piano*
️ *Mary Watkins - Five Movements in Color - II. Soul of Remembrance
Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73
️ *Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
Join us as we conclude our 2022-2023 season with our PRIDE Concert featuring pianist Sara Davis Buechner as she joins our Music Director, Dawn Harms, and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in performing Bernstein’s 2nd Symphony, Age of Anxiety. Loosely based on W.H. Auden’s poem of the same title, the symphony follows six sections mirroring Auden’s text.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was composed by Johannes Brahms in the summer of 1877, during a visit to Pörtschach am Wörthersee, a town in the Austrian province of Carinthia. Its composition was brief in comparison with the 21 years it took Brahms to complete his First Symphony.
The cheery and almost pastoral mood of the symphony often invites comparisons with Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, but, perhaps mischievously, Brahms wrote to his publisher on 22 November 1877 that the symphony "is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad, and the score must come out in mourning."
Mary Watkins describes her Soul of Remembrance from Five Movements in Color as “the African-American experience.” She further describes the second movement, the selection we will be presenting as, “[seeing] her own people in their long march to fully express themselves as fully human”; Moreover, “it’s bittersweet and nostalgic, a song of sorrow and a song of hope.”
For tickets, please visit www.bars-sf.org for information on how you can attend this performance or follow the link to our Tix online purchasing platform. Be sure to subscribe for all of our latest content.