American Symphony Orchestra Offers Free Concerts

The American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) continues its 60th anniversary season on Sunday, June 5 with American Masters, a free symphonic concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center featuring the world premiere of Roberto Sierra's newly commissioned Concerto for Electric Violin performed by acclaimed electric violinist Tracy Silverman. The program will also offer works by three Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: Melinda Wagner, Richard Wernick, and Shulamit Ran.

Leon Botstein will provide musical context for the concert program in a lively, 30-minute Conductor's Notes Q&A session beginning one hour before the performance, also free to all ticketholders. The discussion is an animated learning opportunity for both new concertgoers and music connoisseurs alike.

From May 16 to June 9, the ASO offers free chamber music performances at Manhattan's Bryant Park and at Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy Sounds at Sunset series. These five concerts have been curated by ASO musicians who will perform music ranging from French impressionist composers and Italian works spanning four centuries to Afro-Cuban Batá drumming, as well as a tribute to iconic American jazz composers. Featured artists include ASO percussionist, educator, and composer Javier Diaz, award-winning multi-instrumentalist Alexa Tarantino, accomplished trombonist Dion Tucker and Grammy-nominated Imani Winds' oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz. Music-lovers will find a limited number of first-come, first-served chairs set up near the Bryant Park Fountain Terrace in front of the stage and at Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 3 Greenway Terrace to enjoy an after-work respite with live music. All chamber concerts last for one hour.

The ASO's next symphonic concert is presented in a special collaboration with the Bard Music Festival at Carnegie Hall on July 15 and features the U.S. premiere of Sergei Taneyev's final work, At the Reading of a Psalm. Conceived as a massive statement of Russian Orthodox faith at the onset of WWI, this large-scale cantata for full orchestra, double chorus, and vocal soloists showcases the dramatic effect of Taneyev's contrapuntal mastery. This concert, initially scheduled for January 28, was postponed due to the Omicron variant.