Performances & Events

This evening American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is excited to present Where We Lost Our Shadows, a concert that threads its way through culture and time with three wholly original voices, reimagining the orchestra along the way. ACO first commissioned Du Yun six years ago, premiering her hypnotizing Slow Portraits, and since then she has continued to captivate audiences worldwide with works that defy traditional boundaries between theater, film, and music. Native New Yorker Morton Feldman and expatriate composer Gloria Coates, who has resided in Germany for many decades, are two true American mavericks of our era.In the spirit of bringing our audience and composers together, last season ACO launched its Commission Club, whose members take a deep dive into the creative process. Our first Commission Club composer was Ethan Iverson,who shared insights about writing his offbeat and jazz-tinged Concerto to Scale. This season, in conversation with Du Yun, audience members followed the creative arc of the work you’re hearing tonight, witnessing how she and her collaborators constructed an artistic narrative and brought it to the stage.We hope you’ll join us next season for our third Commission Club and our featured composer Mark Adamo, whose piece speaks to issues in the environment. His apocalyptic Last Year mourns four extreme landscapes,with the deep-voiced cello of virtuoso Jeffrey Ziegler as narrator. Next season in Zankel Hall, alongside Adamo’s work, ACO presents two more musical portraits of our natural world: the world premiere of Nina C. Young’s complete song cycle Out of whose womb came the ice, depicting Ernest Shackleton’s daring expedition to Antarctica, and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s mesmerizing Become River. ACO also focuses on New England—the “cradle” of American classical music—presenting the world premiere of a guitar concerto for dazzling virtuoso JIJI by Underwood Readings commissionee Hilary Purrington, the New York premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Evidence, and an array of world-premiere arrangements of Ives songs by Purrington, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Hannah Lash for mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton.In the meantime, we invite you to open your ears for tonight’s concert, and please join us afterwards in the lobby to celebrate Gloria Coates’s 80thbirthday and her enormous contribution to American music!