Spring for Music

Spring for Music is a multi-year festival of North American orchestras that will have its first outing at Carnegie Hall in May. It aims to celebrate inventiveness in programming and also casts a welcome spotlight on ensembles outside the Big Five group, if that designation still has any meaning. (I'm especially happy to see the Alabama Symphony selected for next year: I wrote about them in 2007.) Spring for Music is running a Fantasy Program Contest, the winner of which will have his or her entry broadcast on Performance Today. As of this writing, a program pairing Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra with John Williams's Superman score is in the lead, but several others are coming up fast. You can vote for programs you like and against programs that you consider silly. The contest closes on Thursday. Tickets also go on sale that day; all seats are $25.

Update: The New Jersey Symphony just announced its 2011-12 season, and there's happy news for those of us who have long been waiting to hear Busoni's Piano Concerto live: that monumental work will appear on the New Jersey's Spring for Music program in May 2012, with Marc-André Hamelin undertaking the infamously difficult solo part. As far as I can tell, the work was last done in New York in 1989.