For its fifth week in the just-renovated Music Hall, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is shining a light on the May Festival Chorus. The program looks back to the event that precipitated the construction of Music Hall, when a thunderstorm pounding on the tin roof of its predecessor, Saengerhalle, ruined a May Festival concert.

Besides revisiting the works from that 1875 program by Bach and Brahms, the orchestra and chorus have commissioned a young American composer, Julia Adolphe, to compose a new work for the chorus.

“Equinox,” an a cappella piece for chorus, will have its world premiere this weekend (8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday) in Music Hall.

Adolphe, 29, a New York native, has already written three works for the New York Philharmonic. Her work is also championed by May Festival music director laureate James Conlon, who presented one of her pieces at the 2016 May Festival. She is now at work on her second opera.

We spoke by phone this week after she had taken the red-eye from Los Angeles where she is earning a doctorate at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California (USC).

Question: I recall hearing your atmospheric piece at the Cathedral Basilica during James Conlon’s final May Festival season. Did your Cincinnati connection come about because of Conlon?Read More »