Full programs for the 2014 edition of Spring for Music — lamentably, the last — have been announced. The series begins on May 5, with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic performing Christopher Rouse's huge Requiem. On May 6, Ludovic Morlot will lead the Seattle Symphony in John Luther Adams's major new work Become Ocean; Varèse's Déserts and Debussy's La Mer fill out what is certain to be a spacious evening. On May 7, Michael Christie and the Rochester Philharmonic present a concert performance of Howard Hanson's opera Merry Mount. On May 8, Alexander Mickelthwate and the Winnipeg Symphony bring to town Derek Charke's Thirteen Inuit Throat Song Games, with Tanya Tagaq as soloist; Vincent Ho's percussion concerto The Shaman, with Evelyn Glennie; and R. Murray Schafer's First Symphony. On May 9, James Conlon marshals the Cincinnati Symphony and May
Festival Chorus in John Adams's Harmonium and R. Nathaniel Dett's 1931 oratorio The Ordering of Moses, which, as I recall, has some stunning passages. (I reviewed a 1993 performance for the Times.) And on May 10 it's Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony in the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, James MacMillan's Woman of the Apocalypse, and a new version of the Mozart Requiem. This series will be missed and mourned.
