Earthly realities, heavenly music. No better way to kick off four decades of music making in Salt Lake City! The 40^th Season opens with one of the most beloved works by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. Compiled from incidental music for the Ibsen play of the same title, Grieg’s compilation contains four movements that have long been audience favorites, including the deeply moving Åse’s Death and the slightly scary In the Hall of a Mountain King. We will follow this familiar music with something no one has heard before—a world premiere! Phillip Bimstein’s The Brahma Viharas was written especially for Charlotte Bell, our SLS English horn player. It is a work celebrating and describing the four Buddhist virtues of Loving Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity using the solo English horn and the colors of a modern orchestra. Since we are on the topic of life and death, we thought it appropriate to close the concert with Richard Strauss’s great tone Poem, Death and Transfiguration, a testament to the late Romantic philosophy. Depicting a dying artist, thoughts of life pass through the orchestra as memories: his childhood innocence, the struggles of his manhood, the attainment of his worldly goals; and at the end, the longed-for transfiguration from the infinite reaches of heaven. It’s an orchestral thrill ride worthy of the life it depicts.

Conductors
Robert Baldwin

• Grieg Peer Gynt Suite #1 (Op. 46)
• Bimstein, Phillip The Brahma Viharas, A Meditation for English Horn and Orchestra World Premiere Solo: Charlotte Bell, English Horn
• Strauss, Richard Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24)