Featuring Drew Peterson, Piano

Drew Petersen is an acclaimed New York-area based American pianist celebrated for his compelling and poetic performances across a diverse repertoire, from Bach to Zaimont. Recognized as a sought-after soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, he has earned numerous accolades, including the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant, the 2017 American Pianists Awards, and the Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship.

The 25/26 season includes recitals in series from San Diego, CA to Westfield, NJ with a program ranging from Mozart to Liszt and John Adams, as well as concerto debuts with the Baltimore and Hartford Symphonies. 2018 marked the release of his first solo recording of music by Barber, Carter, and other American composers on the Steinway & Sons label for which BBC Music Magazine acknowledged his presence as a rising star.

A frequent radio contributor, Petersen has performed on platforms such as McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase, From the Top, and Performance Today. His performances and profiles have been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the award-winning documentary Just Normal by Kim Snyder. An enthusiastic chamber musician, he has appeared on France Musique as part of a Verbier Festival piano trio.

His inclusion in Andrew Solomon’s bestseller Far From the Tree sparked a national dialogue on raising extraordinary and different children. Dedicated to advocating for classical music and the arts, he was awarded the 2006 Davidson Fellows Award for his project, Keeping Classical Music Alive. He has also collaborated with Young Audiences NY to bring performances to New York City’s public schools.

Petersen is also a passionate traveler whose career takes him all over the world, where he explores new cuisines and connects with locals just as eagerly as he performs for fresh audiences. A Harvard graduate, he earned his Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Social Science with honors at just 19 years old. He also completed both his undergraduate and graduate music studies at the prestigious Juilliard School, where he was awarded the renowned Kovner Fellowship. Deeply committed to the role of music in today’s global society, Petersen has gained a unique perspective on how musical performances can uplift and enrich humanity. Through his extensive concert experience, he hopes to share his musical journey with others, inviting audiences to witness the transformative power of the arts firsthand.

Program Notes

Aaron Copland

Fanfare for the Common Man

The title alone was an act of defiance.

It was 1942. America had just entered the war. Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, had the inspired idea of commissioning a series of fanfares from leading composers, something to open concerts with patriotic fire. Most of his composers did what you'd expect: Fanfare for the Fighting Men, Fanfare for Airmen, Fanfare for Heroes. Brass, drums, glory.

Aaron Copland called his Fanfare for the Common Man.

Goossens was a little taken aback. Copland was not. "The times," he said, "seemed to call for a gesture in the opposite direction." Not the generals. Not the heroes. The ordinary person. The one doing the living and the dying.

The piece is scored for brass and percussion alone, not a string or woodwind in sight. It opens with a single stroke of the tam-tam and bass drum, hanging in the air like a question. Then the brass enter—slow, wide-spaced, utterly unadorned. No flourishes. No speed. Just weight and dignity, the musical equivalent of standing up straight.

It only lasts three minutes, and in that short time, Copland somehow manages to sound like wide open spaces, something fundamentally American. If you asked him to explain exactly how he did it, he'd probably struggle to tell you. The harmonies are open and unresolved, the rhythm deliberate, the silences as important as the notes. It feels inevitable, as if it couldn't have been written any other way.

Copland liked it so much he later wove it into his Third Symphony, one of the great American symphonies, giving it an even grander home. But it has always been most itself standing alone, doing exactly what it set out to do: honoring the person in the seat next to you.

Three minutes. No apologies. Pure spine.

Samuel Barber

Adagio for Strings

There is a short list of pieces of music that a civilization reaches for in moments of grief.

Barber's Adagio is on that list. It has been played at the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, at memorial services after September 11th, and in concert halls on every continent when words simply won't do. It runs about eight minutes. It contains no fireworks, no virtuosity, no drama in the conventional sense. It is just strings, climbing.

How does a twenty-six-year-old write something like that?

Samuel Barber was a prodigy who somehow avoided the curse of prodigies. He didn't flame out, didn't chase trends, didn't spend his career trying to recapture early glory. He simply kept writing music of uncommon emotional honesty, songs, operas, concertos, in a language that felt personal rather than fashionable.

In 1936, while working on a string quartet, he pulled the slow movement out and arranged it for full string orchestra. He sent it, almost offhandedly, to Arturo Toscanini, the most famous conductor in the world. Toscanini's response was unusual: he sent the score back without comment, which panicked Barber completely. Only later did he learn that Toscanini returned scores only when he had memorized them. He conducted the premiere in 1938, and the piece entered history almost immediately.

What happens in those eight minutes is both simple and inexorable.

A single melody begins in the violas, quiet, searching, not quite settled. The other strings pick it up and carry it higher, the harmony shifting underneath like clouds. Just when you think it has found peace, it reaches further. And further. The entire piece is one long, controlled ascent toward a climax that arrives with shattering force, and then, silence. A full stop before the strings return, alone, to end in a whisper.

There are no tricks here. Barber simply understood something about longing, about the feeling of reaching for something just beyond your grasp, and found the exact notes for it.

Some music entertains. Some music elevates. And some music, rarely, says the thing you couldn't say yourself.

This is that music.

George Gershwin

Rhapsody in Blue

It almost didn't exist.

In January 1924, George Gershwin opened his morning newspaper and discovered he was writing a concerto. His friend and bandleader Paul Whiteman had placed an advertisement announcing a concert called "An Experiment in Modern Music" and listed, among the program, a new jazz concerto by George Gershwin. Gershwin had agreed to no such thing. He had five weeks.

He sat down and wrote one of the most famous pieces of American music ever composed.

Gershwin was twenty-five years old and already a Broadway sensation—hit songs, packed theaters, the genuine article. But he had always felt the pull of something larger. He heard in jazz not just entertainment but an entire emotional world waiting to be taken seriously. "It was a purpose that had been haunting me," he wrote. New York City itself was the subject, the energy, the longing, the noise, the romance of it. He wanted to capture all of that in a single piece.

The premiere on February 12, 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York was a revelation. In the audience: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski. The piece was performed in an orchestration by Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé, and the lush, big-band version most familiar today, came later.

It opens with one of the greatest entrances in all of music.

A clarinet trill, low and lazy, and then a long, swooping wail up through the instrument's entire range that seems to arrive from somewhere between a blues singer and a taxi horn. It is seventeen notes and announces everything that follows. This music will not choose between the concert hall and the dance hall, because it belongs to both.

It is less a formal composition than a magnificent, sprawling conversation, between piano and orchestra, between composed and improvised, between longing and exhilaration. There is a theme of such aching beauty that when it finally arrives, fully stated, audiences at the premiere reportedly wept. Gershwin himself was the soloist that night, partly improvising as he went, the ink barely dry.

Critics at the time couldn't quite decide what it was. Too jazzy for the concert hall, too classical for the jazz world. Gershwin ignored both camps. A century later the piece has outlasted every argument about it, and that swooping clarinet still sounds like nothing else on earth.

Some music describes a place. This one is a place. Specifically, New York, 1924, alive and impossibly young.

John Williams

A Celebration

There is a generation of people who were brought to classical music by John Williams and don't even know it.

They just know that something happened in a dark theater, a screen lit up, an orchestra exploded, and something in their chest responded before their brain had time to think about it. That is not an accident. That is one of the greatest living composers doing exactly what he set out to do.

Tonight, we celebrate him. And we invite you to something more, but we'll get to that.

John Williams grew up in New York, moved to Hollywood, and proceeded to score the soundtrack of the late twentieth century. Five Academy Awards. Twenty-five Grammy nominations. The themes you are about to hear are not merely movie music, they are the emotional architecture of stories that have shaped how entire generations understand heroism, wonder, and adventure.

What makes them endure is surprisingly simple: Williams writes melodies. Genuine, singable, indelible melodies of the kind that lodge in the memory after a single hearing and never quite leave. In an era when film scores often dissolved into atmospheric texture, he insisted on the tune. He was right.

The Raiders March announces itself like a handshake from the most capable person in the room, confident, irresistible, immediately trustworthy. It is Indiana Jones in musical form: adventure with a wink.

The Superman Main Title is something else entirely. That fanfare in the opening bars is pure, uncomplicated aspiration, the sound of believing that someone might actually save the day. Williams has said he wanted it to make you feel that a man could fly. It does.

Princess Leia's Theme is the emotional counterweight to all that brass and muscle, a flowing, tender melody for solo oboe that speaks of dignity, resolve, and quiet courage. In a universe of laser battles and space opera, Williams gave its princess an inner life.

Hedwig's Theme begins with a celesta, that shimmering, clockwork instrument that sounds like moonlight on a windowpane. It is music that makes the ordinary world feel like it's hiding something magical just beneath the surface. Which, of course, it is.

Nimbus 2000 is the quidditch music, and if Hedwig's Theme is wonder, this is pure exhilaration. The orchestra takes flight, literally: rhythmically driven, breathless, the musical equivalent of an eleven-year-old discovering he can ride a broomstick and is, to everyone's astonishment including his own, extraordinary at it.

Harry's Wondrous World is Williams at his most expansive—a sweeping, full-hearted theme that plays when Harry first truly understands that this world is real, that he belongs to it, and that everything is about to change. It is the sound of a door opening. If the other two movements show us the magic, this one shows us what it means.

The Imperial March needs no introduction. If Darth Vader's theme has taught the world anything, it's that a minor key, a relentless pulse, and four brass notes can make even a ten-year-old feel genuine dread. It is one of the most effective pieces of musical villainy ever written.

And then there is Star Wars.

What Williams created for that film in 1977 was not just a score, it was a resurrection. He brought back the sweeping, full-throated orchestral sound of the golden age of Hollywood at a moment when no one thought anyone wanted it anymore. George Lucas had gambled everything on it. The morning after the premiere, Williams's music was as famous as the film itself.

Which brings us to next April.

We will be performing Star Wars: A New Hope, the original film, live, with full orchestra playing Williams's complete score in real time as the movie plays above us. Every scene. Every moment. The Cantina Band. The Death Star assault. That final, triumphant march.

If tonight whets your appetite, April will be the feast.

The lights go down. The orchestra raises their bows. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away —it begins.