NOI Philharmonic: George Walker’s Lilacs

Joseph Young brings his elegance and flair to The Clarice in his NOI Philharmonic debut in a program featuring works by Hector Berlioz, George Walker and Sergei Prokofiev. Berlioz’s Roman Carnival launches the program with a dazzling array of bright colors illuminating theme’s from Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini. Walker’s Lilacs scores Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” for soprano soloist and orchestra with a beautiful and evocative lyrical quality. As a result of the 1996 premiere, Walker was the first African-American composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The program concludes with Prokofiev’s monumental Symphony No. 5. According to the composer, he “conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit…praising the free and happy man–his strength, his generosity and the purity of his soul.”