America Variations on a Theme | Adella

In a program of quintessentially early 20th-century American composers—Copland, Ellington, and Gershwin—pianist Marc-André Hamelin, conductor David Robertson, and The Cleveland Orchestra offer a musical portrait of early 20th-century America as they experienced it: its promises, its tensions, and the complex beauty of its unfinished ideal. In conversation, Hamelin reflects on his early exposure to jazz and his approach to interpreting the music of Gershwin and Ellington, while Robertson considers each piece as a lens on the nation itself: Rhapsody in Blue as a burst of restless urban energy; New World A-Comin’ as Ellington’s dream of a more just future; Appalachian Spring as a quiet assertion of renewal and self-reliance; and The Tender Land as a postwar parable of a nation unsettled—seeking stability, identity, and a way forward. “Copland is very good at letting us hear just how these bedrock values of American life are ones that we all share,” Robertson says, “but we have differences of opinion in how to bring them about.”