True Concord Voices & Orchestra
Eric Holtan, conductor

Ensemble

The fascinating and rarely performed Airborne Symphony is the perfect piece to pay homage to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base—a world premiere of a new suite version focused on the exhilaration of flying and the miracle of flight itself.

Leonard Bernstein so loved this work that he not only premiered it—with Orson Welles narrating—but he also recorded it twice. The fascinating Airborne Symphony is a great way to celebrate Tucson’s birthday!

Beginning with the words “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history…,” Copland’s Lincoln Portrait sets to music excerpts of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest documents. Too extensive to list, past luminary narrators range from Marian Anderson to Neil Armstrong, Barack Obama to Walter Cronkite, Danny Glover to Katherine Hepburn, and Coretta Scott King to Carl Sandburg.

Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom is a setting of texts by Thomas Jefferson in a work created for the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth.

Works by Gershwin, Bernstein and Weill top off this All-American program.