Daniel Raiskin and the WSO retake the stage on closing night to present epic works by three international luminaries of contemporary music.
The program opens with the Canadian premiere of METACOSMOS, a consciousness-expanding orchestral work by star Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, her first commission for the New York Philharmonic. The piece embodies the power and chaos of the cosmos, a reflection of the composer’s concern with the current state of the world.
Roomful of Teeth add a new dimension (or eight) to the orchestral palette, joining the WSO for Caroline Shaw’s hypnotic Music in Common Time. The youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her paradigm-shifting work Partita, Shaw emerged from the New York scene to become one of the most recognizable young figureheads of 21st-century music.
Capping off the festival is Distinguished Guest Composer Pēteris Vasks’s Symphony No. 2, a monumental single-movement work that lays bare the composer’s vast emotional canvas, from blistering rage to serene contemplation and icy despair.