David Alan Miller Conducts Lincoln-DeCusatis, Nielsen & Strauss | NOI Philharmonic

A long-time collaborator of the festival, David Alan Miller returns to conduct the NOI Philharmonic! A champion of American music, Miller has led the Philharmonic on several recordings under the Naxos Records label as part of its “American Classics” series, including their 2018 Grammy-nominated album for “Best Orchestral Performance.” This concert will feature Carl Nielsen’s dramatic Symphony No. 4, “The Inextinguishable,” which was composed in 1916 among the backdrop of the first World War. Written in four movements without pause, this unique symphony asks its listeners to sit with the discomfort of humanity’s dissonances–highlighted by two dueling timpani in the final movement–while simultaneously facing the inevitable, inspiring perseverance of life. Aptly fitted alongside this provocative work sits Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, a tone poem based on the legendary Spanish libertine, and the premiere of NOI+F Composition Faculty Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis’s The River That Flows Both Ways, a musical journey that follows the course of the Hudson River. Beginning in icy tranquility high in the Adirondacks mountains, the river carries the listener through a series of dramatic landscapes, mountains, palisades and tidal basins as it builds in momentum and finally meets the metropolis at its end in a blur of rhythmic energy.