Danzmayr Conducts Cuong & Strauss • NOI Philharmonic

The NOI+F 2025 season comes to a close with an evening of world-changing music, with grandiose themes and big ideas given musical shape. The much-in-demand composer Viet Cuong's 2024 work, John and Jim, is a playfully melodic composition centering on the relationship of John Arthur and Jim Obergefell, the titular plaintiff of the Obergefell v. Hodges 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in America. This new transcript of John and Jim for full orchestra, commissioned exclusively by NOI+F, will debut nearly ten years to the day after the passing of that highly influential case. We continue on with 20th-century German Romantic composer, Richard Strauss. Strauss' short comic opera Der Rosenklavier and the symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra are generally acknowledged as his best known works. Indeed, the modern association of Zarathustra's opening with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey imbues Strauss' opus with an indelible spirit of expansion and evolution. These masterpieces are squarely in the interpretive wheelhouse of Austrian-born conductor David Danzmayr, making his NOI+F debut. Danzmayr's stellar seasons as director of the Oregon Symphony have rendered him one of his generation's most celebrated conductors.