Anxiety

From anxiety about nuclear destruction to Rachmaninoff’s angst, which led him to creative block, this programme pauses on one of the great ills that affects our society after the pandemic. In his opera Doctor Atomic (2015), John Adams presents a desperate glimpse of the stress and pain suffered by those that were in Los Alamos, New Mexico preparing the test for the first atomic bomb during World War II. And in Symphonic Dances, written in 1940 from his North American exile, Rachmaninoff remembered his youth, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and added reflections on death and resurrection. The programme, which also includes a classic of music in the United States, Lyric for strings by George Walker, will be the debut of one of the most prominent young conductors from that country, Roderick Cox.