About the Program

The 2026-27 Masterworks season opens with a program exploring the many influences that have shaped American music. Music Director Aram Demirjian brings together four composers whose works reflect questions of identity, cultural exchange, and the continuing evolution of an American musical voice.

The evening opens with Is This the Happiest Place on Earth? by Korean American composer Nicky Sohn. Drawing partly on her childhood perceptions of America through Disney, Sohn describes the work as exploring the tension between fantasy and reality and our cultural fascination with happiness, spectacle, and perfection.

Cellist Sterling Elliott joins the KSO for Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, composed during the Czech composer’s years in the United States. The work also carries a deeply personal story: Dvořák incorporated a favorite song of his beloved sister-in-law Josefina into the concerto and returned to it in the finale after her death in 1895.

William Grant Still’s groundbreaking Afro-American Symphony became the first symphony by a Black composer performed by a major American orchestra when it premiered in 1931. Still sought to demonstrate how the blues could become the foundation for a symphonic work. Before each movement, KSO Poet-in-Residence Rhea Carmon will present poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose writing inspired Still as he created the work.

The program concludes with George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, his musical portrait of an American visitor taking in the sights and sounds of Paris. Gershwin went so far as to acquire authentic French taxi horns for the work’s premiere, incorporating the sounds of the city directly into the orchestra.