DuPage Symphony Orchestra: Inspirations

The DSO November concert opens with William Schuman’s New England Triptych: Three Pieces for Orchestra after William Billings. With skillful orchestration and poignant harmonization, Schuman’s tribute to this early American choral composer from the Northeast captures “the spirit of sinewy ruggedness, deep religiosity, and patriotic fervor that we associate with the Revolutionary period.” Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s well-known Romeo and Juliet: A Fantasy Overture follows, as a stirring expression of the timeless Shakespearean tragedy about two young lovers caught in the web of a senseless family feud. The program concludes with Howard Hanson’s melodious Symphony No. 2 in D-flat Major, the so-called Romantic, which has been hailed as “the epitome of the twentieth-century symphony…written by an American.” Hanson himself described this cyclical, three-movement work written in 1930 as “young in spirit, lyrical and romantic in temperament, and simple and direct in expression.”