Exiles and Dreamers

A place to call home … for Antonín Dvořák, inspiration came from the culture and aspirations of his native Bohemia. Henri Dutilleux took the words of exiles and dreamers, and transformed their hopes and sorrows into ravishing tenderness and beautiful sounds, while George Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lilacs gives Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln a resonance that gains extra power from his own experience as an African American. Launching our season-long exploration of the music of identity and displacement, Edward Gardner conducts music drenched in longing, in hope, and (like Tchaikovsky’s impassioned Overture) in the boundless horizons of the human heart.