Corigliano and Brahms on Next Classical Showcase

On Friday evening at 7, the next Classical Showcase continues with another live concert performance from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.  Gustavo Dudamel leads the ensemble in a program going from sadness to sunlight: John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 and Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 2. American composer John Corigliano wrote his Symphony No. 1 as a response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980's.  Initially reluctant to write a symphony, he said that this music "was about world-scale tragedy and, I felt, needed a comparably epic form." This symphony in four movements from 1988 was composed after Corigliano saw "The Quilt" memorial exhibition for those who had died of AIDS.  Each square of the several thousand fabric panels was made by a loved one of a person who died.  The entire quilt covered about the area of a football field.  "The Quilt" continues to grow.  There are currently over 48,000 individual panels. This powerful and deeply felt symphony is a musical equivalent, with the four movements representing friends of the composer who had died. The second half of the concert features the sunny side of German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms.  His Symphony No. 2 in D was written in the summer of 1877, just a year after the successful premier of his dramatic First Symphony in the key of D minor. That symphony took some 15 years to complete due to the high expectations set by Beethoven earlier in the 19th century.  Composers such as Brahms believed you couldn't just casually knock off a symphony after Beethoven's Ninth. With his confidence and creativity freed, Brahms' Second Symphony flowed with ease and grace.  It has its tinges of sadness at times, but they are relatively fleeting in this gorgeous Late-Romantic orchestral work .  The overall mood is one of confident optimism, and the finale is outright exuberant. Classical Showcase airs Friday evening at 7 on Classical 101.