Individual tickets: $35. Joslyn members may receive a 20% discount for Symphony Joslyn series or single tickets by calling Ticket Omaha at (402) 345-0606 or showing a Joslyn membership card if purchasing tickets at the door the day of the concert. Strauss Performing Arts Center is located at 6305 University Drive North between the Criss Library and the Milo Bail Student Center parallel to Dodge Street. See the full series schedule at omahasymphony.org.
MUSICAL PROGRAM
Higdon & Mendelssohn 5
Omaha Symphony Principal Viola Thomas Kluge gives the Omaha premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Viola Concerto, a work that shines a spotlight on the instrument’s expressive sensitivity.
IVES: Symphony No. 3, "The Camp Meeting"
JENNIFER HIGDON: Viola Concerto
MENDELSSOHN: Symphony No. 5, "Reformation"
COLLECTION CONNECTION
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Ph.D., Richard and Mary Holland Assistant Curator of American Western Art, explores prints by Currier & Ives (American, active 1834–1907).
Composers Charles Ives and Jennifer Higdon both pay homage to American popular music through their respective works. Ives’s Symphony No. 3, "The Camp Meeting" is meant to be a recollection of the songs sung at summer campfires in his native Connecticut, as well as a reference to army bivouacs during the Civil War. Higdon has conceived her Viola Concerto as “something that sounded very American,” as she stated in a 2019 interview. In it, she pays tribute to popular music in the United States, especially traveling fiddlers and street musicians.
In the nineteenth century, the lithographic firm Currier & Ives already referenced this mythology of simple pleasures found in the great American outdoors and expressed through cultural folkways. Prints like Snap Apple Night, The Arkansas Traveller, and Camping in the Woods illustrate the role of leisurely gatherings and itinerant culture in shaping a sense of community, particularly through music and singing, within American society. This merriment, sometimes tinged with irony, favored the development of folk melodies, a genre that Currier & Ives also promoted by printing sheet music.
Shown Above: Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (American, 1819–1905), Camping in the Woods: “A Good Time Coming,” 1863, lithograph, Gift of Conagra Brands, 2016.20.486