NJPAC in Newark

An American genius, Florence Price mixes luscious lyricism with ragtime stomp. This recently unearthed gem won Cann—the leading interpreter of Price’s piano music—a 2023 GRAMMY.

United Airlines knows a good tune when it hears one, and that melody is the heartbeat of Gershwin’s classic. But not before the famous swooping clarinet solo gets this piece of the Roaring Twenties underway.

Carlos Simon is one of America’s leading contemporary composers, and in his latest music, a proud co-commission of the New Jersey Symphony, Simon gives voice to all 12 zodiac signs—the music at turns fiery, ethereal, and soaring.

Cowboy songs, folk tunes, and a visionary composer—all the ingredients that made Copland’s wild-west ballet a hit in the ‘30s and a favorite still.

The spotlight opens on the New Jersey Symphony’s virtuoso strings playing the sunniest music Mozart ever created.

Principal Clarinet Juan Esteban Martinez will shine in this sunny crown jewel of the clarinet repertoire, which was written for an earlier iteration of the modern clarinet.

His greatest inspiration came from long walks in nature, score paper, and pencil stuffed in his pocket. Beethoven takes us with him in his Sixth, his music full of open-air melodies, and the drama of a ferocious storm.

The music swells and surges just as the waves off Scotland’s coast carried the young Mendelssohn past moody cliffs and caves and sent him reaching for his score paper.

Though called a “symphony,” this is where superstar Joshua Bell stands and lets his Stradivarius violin sing the silvery songs of Spain.

“The jolliest piece I’ve ever done,” wrote an ecstatic young Mendelssohn to his parents back in Berlin, after arriving in Italy and falling in love with its sunshine, sidewalk tunes, coast, and effervescent colors—all of which he poured into his Fourth Symphony.