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Arthur Honegger
Pastorale d'été for Chamber Orchestra
In 1920, an influential article hailed a group of young French composers as “Les Six,” placing them in the same revered class as the “Russian Five” from a previous generation, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov among them. Honegger was less of a trickster than his five Satie-influenced peers, which included Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, and his sincerity came through in Pastorale d’été (Summer Pastoral) from that same breakout year. In the score, an epigraph by the influential French poet Arthur Rimbaud sets the mood for this short tone poem: “J’ai embrasse l’aube d’ete.” (“I have embraced the summer dawn.”) The opening passage and other long stretches maintain a static harmony built on the mixolydian mode, defined by its lowered seventh tone compared to a major scale. This prolonged vamp is undeniably bluesy, conveying the same languid calm that would mark the cool jazz of later decades.
Aaron Grad ©2019
Gabriela Lena Frank
Sandbox Premiere (World Premiere, SPCO Commission)
Robert Schumann arr. Eric Stokes
Prophet Bird (World Premiere, SPCO Commission)
About This Program
Approximate length 1:18
Experience the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with Sandbox Composer-in-Residence Gabriela Lena Frank, the SPCO and The Great Northern. As a composer, Frank’s body of work centers climate change, community, and the role of the artist in stewarding change in the face of a heating planet, all while “navigating the elusive space between alarm and aspiration as we face the environmental crisis.” Her Sandbox premiere is similarly ecologically fixated, written in response to the French American writer and ornithologist John James Audubon, who inspired the modern conservation movement through his study of birds in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In collaboration with poet and librettist J. Drew Lanham, Frank grapples with Audubon’s complicated legacy — though biracial, an anti-abolitionist who worked to advance his own white supremacist worldview while simultaneously relying on Indigenous and Black knowledge to further his own studies — mapping a network of contradictions that Frank explores through the unifying imagery of birds as prophets of ecological change.
Experience the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with Sandbox Composer-in-Residence Gabriela Lena Frank, the SPCO and The Great Northern. As a composer, Frank’s body of work centers climate change, community, and the role of the artist in stewarding change in the face of a heating planet, all while “navigating the elusive space between alarm and aspiration as we face the environmental crisis.” Her Sandbox premiere is similarly ecologically fixated, written in response to the French American writer and ornithologist John James Audubon, who inspired the modern conservation movement through his study of birds in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In collaboration with poet and librettist J. Drew Lanham, Frank grapples with Audubon’s complicated legacy — though biracial, an anti-abolitionist who worked to advance his own white supremacist worldview while simultaneously relying on Indigenous and Black knowledge to further his own studies — mapping a network of contradictions that Frank explores through the unifying imagery of birds as prophets of ecological change.
Individual and Concert Member tickets will go on sale in August. Currently, you can purchase a Season Ticket Package, starting at 3 concerts, for the 2025.26 Season.
Frank’s Sandbox Premiere was commissioned by The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with support from Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting and the Serge Koussevitsky Music Foundation.
SPCO Sandbox Composer Residencies are made possible by generous project support from:
Amphion Foundation
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music
Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University
David and Karen Olson Family Foundation
Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting
Nara Fund
New Music USA
Learn more about our Sandbox Residency at thespco.org/Sandbox.
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