American Orchestral Maneuvers, via the Music Academy of the West

How will you celebrate America’s 250th birthday? On a national level, we all know about Trump and the trouble he has seen in trying to pull musicians into his Washington Independence Day blowout. No right-minded or left-leaning musician wants the stigma of serenading for a tyrant, apparently, so he turned the spotlight on himself, his favorite subject.

On a local level, and on a serious music note, our grand house of culture that is the Granada Theatre gives its pre-holiday Friday night slot to a double celebration. This is the night when the Music Academy of the West’s eagerly-anticipated summer orchestra outings kick off, and with a suitably patriotic program of music by the great American hero George Gershwin, and his classic American in Paris, with Brahms’ Pastoral Symphony rounding out the menu.

Each summer, the Music Academy hosts a handful of concerts by its always impressive Academy Festival Orchestra (AFO) — young fellows coming together for the first time as an ensemble, but with surprisingly professional results. They are led by noted, widely acclaimed, and traveled conductors. The first of these, on Friday, will be the Peruvian-born Miguel Harth-Bedoya.

Orchestra music fans, both established and curious, would be well-advised to mark calendars: The series continues on July 11, 18 (at the Lobero), and August 1, with the finale on August 8.

This Friday’s well-timed American sounds are part of the Music Academy’s propitious “American Mosaic” theme, which continues, orchestrally, with Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait on the July 18 program, and Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) doing the narration honors (the originally slated narrator, Josh Brolin, had to bow out — Hollywood was calling). 

Also on that program is genre-crossing American composer Jasmine Arielle-Barnes’s American Lament, featuring MAW vocal department co-head Sasha Cooke. For Eurocentric grounding, that night’s program also includes Schumann’s Symphony No. 2. The conductor for the occasion is the respected and rising New Zealander Gemma New.

Another anticipated — and American — highlight of the series, and the festival overall, is the August 1 program featuring a new-ish piano concerto titled No Such Spring by Samuel Adams (son of John, respected in his own right). Notably, the piece, which premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 2023 with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, was written for and featured MAW faculty pianist Conor Hanick. That night will also feature the Symphony No. 1 of fabulous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, with Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu on the podium.

An intergalactic angle hits the Granada on July 11, when the AFO, led by Chinese-American maestra Xian Zhang, presents Gustav Holst’s popular pieces The Planets, adorned with multimedia elements and NASA footage in what is described as “an HD Odyssey.” That night includes the kinder, gentler serialist Anton Webern’s pre-serialist, late-romantic tone poem Im Sommerwind and Primal Message by the very-much-living composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama.

Things go fully transatlantic and standard repertoire-minded on the finale night of August 8, when conductor David Danzmayr leads the AFO in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat and the chestnut-y Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninoff (a k a Rach) as the coup de grâce.

All in all, MAW’s orchestral pageantry looks strong and varied this year, and with a fitting focus on things American.

For more information, see musicacademy.org.