Music Director Christopher Zimmerman conducts the FSO. (Photo Credit: Traci Brooks, Lock & Company)
Founded in 1957, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra (FSO) has been hailed by the Washington Post as “a crown jewel of the cultural landscape” and has continued to promote its mission to inspire and engage a large, diverse audience in the Northern Virginia region and beyond. Under the direction of award-winning Christopher Zimmerman, the FSO brings its incredible group of musicians and featured soloists to Fairfax this summer and into the 2024-25 Great Performances at Mason season.
Melodies of the Soul with Cellist Inbal Segev: Saturday, May 18 at 8 p.m.
Heralded by the New York Times as a "composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods," English composer Anna Clyne’s Dance for cello and orchestra will have its regional premiere at Mason’s Harris Theatre with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra with “first-class” (The Strad) Israeli-American cellist Inbal Segev. The thrilling program also features Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, as well as Stravinsky’s Orchestral Suite and Pulcinella Suite. Drawing inspiration from the words of 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, Dance transports listeners to ethereal realms through its enchanting melodies. This extraordinary concerto, composed for cellist Segev, has garnered immense praise, with its opening movement amassing more than three million plays on Spotify and earning a place among NPR Music's "Favorite Songs of 2020." For a preview of Dance, a piece “that is so beautiful, so heartfelt that it instantly [draws] tears on first hearing” (Gramophone), watch the video below.
Celebrating Gershwin at 100 with Pianist Jeffrey Biegel: Sunday, June 9 at 4 p.m.
Identified as a “splendid musician and a brilliant performer” by famed American composer Leonard Bernstein, pianist Jeffrey Biegel joins the FSO in a celebration of 100 years of Gershwin, which juxtaposes the composer’s classic Rhapsody in Blue with the special Virginia premiere of Peter Boyer's Red, White, and Blue for piano and orchestra. Boyer’s composition is part of a national campaign established by Biegel to premiere the work in all 50 states, as a way for our country to “join hands through music, despite all the divisions and differences.” Biegel adds, “Why not celebrate being an American — celebrating our diversity through unity and celebrating ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ with a new ‘Rhapsody?’” This concert at the Center for the Arts also features Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, which the Boston Symphony premiered in 1896: the first symphony published by an American woman composer.
Fairfax Symphony with Jeremy Denk: Saturday, November 23 at 8 p.m.
Fairfax Symphony Orchestra joins the Center for the Arts’s 2024-25 Great Performances at Mason season in a special co-presentation featuring Jeremy Denk, one of America’s foremost pianists. Denk is the winner of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship Grant and the Avery Fisher Prize, recently being elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences. In the November performance, Denk joins the esteemed FSO for Beethoven’s poetic Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, in a program that also includes the regional premiere of Quinn Mason’s She Dreams of Flying and Rachmaninoff’s last work, Symphonic Dances. Watch the video below for a special preview of Denk’s outlook on Beethoven’s fourth concerto.
The 2023-24 FSO concert season is made possible in part by generous supporters including The Mather in Tysons, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Hilton Fairfax, and Goodwin Living.