2026 Concert Programs

An American Showcase

The Stockbridge Sinfonia celebrates our nation’s 250th anniversary with a program of works by American composers, featuring the stunning Symphony No. 1 in E minor by Florence Price. The orchestra teams up with members of Berkshire County choirs to present choral works by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, as well as America the Beautiful.

The program will also include Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major with Peter Fiegel, the Sinfonia’s principal trumpet as soloist, and the world premiere of Stephen Murray’s Ceremonial Music for Orchestra. Program notes for these pieces are below.

The concerts are free and open to the public.

Performance Dates

Saturday, August 1, 2026, 3:00 PM
Lenox Memorial Middle & High School
197 East Street
Lenox, MA

Saturday, August 8, 2026, 3:00 PM
Zion Lutheran Church
74 First Street
Pittsfield, MA

Sunday, August 9, 2026, 6:00 PM
Saint James Place
352 Main Street
Great Barrington, MA

Florence Price, Symphony No. 1

Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953) was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, was valedictorian of her Catholic convent high school, and was musically trained at the New England Conservatory. She married, had two daughters, and moved to Chicago in 1927 where she studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in Chicago. Price completed her Symphony No. 1 in E minor in 1932 and entered it in the Wanamaker Foundation competition where it won first prize. The symphony was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. To create the parts for this performance, Price and several friends sat around her kitchen table and copied out the parts by hand. The performance was a major event, broadcast by NBC radio and attended George Gershwin and Adlai Stevenson. The audience was enthusiastic, and the symphony won critical acclaim. Like Dvořák’s New World Symphony, and much of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work, Price’s Symphony No. 1 incorporates themes from African American folk music.

The third movement, entitled “Juba Dance” is based on the African folk dance, “Pattin’ Juba,” later known as “hambone,” that involves stomping and slapping and patting the arms, legs, chest, and cheeks, often with lyrics and call and response added.

Price wrote four symphonies, four concertos, ten other works for orchestra, ten chamber works, fifteen choral works, over 100 works for solo vocal and piano, and over 100 works for solo piano. After her death in 1953, much of her work was lost, but in 2009 a large number of her manuscripts were discovered in boxes in the attic of an abandoned dilapidated house in the small village of St. Anne, Illinois that Price had used as a summer home.

Leonard Bernstein, Make Our Garden Grow*

The original “Candide” novella was written by Voltaire in 1759.  As a young man, Candide lives a sheltered life in a Garden of Eden paradise.  His lifestyle abruptly ends, followed by a slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with some advice for us all, "we must cultivate our garden."

Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide is based on Voltaire’s original.  It's a fairy tale about how to live in a world full of injustice, horrors, greed, stupidity, wars, and disease. Bernstein ends his Candide with “Make Our Garden Grow.”  It is a metaphor for life.  Incrementally, Bernstein and Voltaire are saying, make that life, make that garden better. There is no magic wand, no deus ex machina ending, no knight in shining armor, only the billions of individual deeds that billions of individuals should do to grow our earthly garden.

Let dreamers dream
What worlds they please
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers,
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!

Aaron Copland, The Promise of Living**

The story involves a young girl graduating from high school who falls in love with a hobo. He eventually sacrifices her because he understands that she is not cut out for his life, but she leaves home anyway. The themes of gain and loss, leaving and staying, must have resonated strongly with Americans emerging from depression and world war.

“The Promise of Living” is a quintet that unites hobos and family, at the end of the first act in Copland’s opera “The Tender Land,” in celebration of the harvest and its traditions. Even without voices, the use of the folk hymn “Zion’s Walls” and Copland’s transparent scoring create a clear dramatic sequence. A dramatic gesture gives way to a quiet, lyrical string passage, in which the gentle rise and fall of the melody suggests the unfolding sequence of wistful thoughts. Woodwinds gradually interject to create a sense of dialogue, both internal and, eventually, external. The strings answer, this time fuller, building to a passage that is signature Copland: a smooth melody rooted in open harmonies, with bits of short, repeated motives in call and response style keep the music moving. Brass eventually join the scene, their chorale style underscoring the ritualistic role of the moment without losing the introspective quality that draws together community and individual, past and present.  [from Los Angeles Philharmonic annotator Susan Key]

Franz Joseph Haydn, Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major

Franz Joseph Haydn composed his Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major in 1796 for the newly invented “keyed trumpet.”  It was the first trumpet concerto written for the keyed trumpet and has been cited as "possibly Haydn's most popular concerto."

The invention of the keyed trumpet, which made performance of the Haydn concerto possible, is often attributed to Anton Weidinger for whom Haydn wrote the concerto. The Haydn concerto begins with the arpeggios and fanfare motifs, common to trumpet music of the time, but then includes diatonic melodies and chromatic runs not possible on the natural trumpet.  Forty years later, the valve trumpet was invented which today replaces the keyed trumpet.

Peter Fiegel, soloist for the Haydn concerto, is the Sinfonia’s principal trumpet and a student at The Hartt School performing arts conservatory of the University of Hartford. He will perform the concerto on an E-flat trumpet.

Stephen Murray, Ceremonial Music for Orchestra

Stephen Murray began playing string bass in high school, and while doing graduate studies at Miami University, he studied with Harold Roberts, principal bassist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.  Over the years, Steve has performed with a variety of notables such as Buddy DiFranco, George Wilson, Gray Sargent and Judy Collins among others.  Steve has founded and directed his own jazz bands including the 19-piece Berkshire Big Band which he directed and arranged for two decades, and he has contracted for the likes of Burt Bacharach, Natalie Cole, Willie Nelson and others. 

As a composer, Steve was the recipient of the grand prize in the Harmonia Choir Composition Contest, Ottawa in 2006, the grand prize in the Vaughan Williams Choral Composition Contest, Yorkshire, UK in 2008, and he was co-winner of the 2010 New England Choral Composition Contest, Somerville, MA.  He won the grand prize in the 2011 Freudig Singers (Buffalo, NY) Choral Composition Contest.   He was a semifinalist in composition for the 2013 American Prize and a finalist for the 2014 American Prize.

*Make Our Garden Grow
From Candide
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Lyrics by Richard Wilber
Other lyric contributions by John Latouche, Dorothy
Parker, Lillian Hellman, and Leonard Bernstein.
Used by arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.,
sole agent for Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing
Company LLC, publisher and copyright owner.

**The Promise of Living
From The Tender Land
Music by Aaron Copland
Used by arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.,
sole agent for Aaron Copland,
publisher and copyright owner.