Tucson Desert Song Festival - The Tucson Spirit, The Love of Flight: An All-American Program

About the Event

The Tucson Spirit, The Love of Flight: An All-American Program featuring Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony Suite, Coprland’s Lincoln Portrait, Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, & works by Bernstein, Weill, & Gershwin

Celebrate Tucson’s connections to the skies. The fascinating and rarely performed Airborne Symphony is the perfect piece to pay homage to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base—a world premiere of a new suite version focused on the exhilaration of flying and the miracle of flight itself. Beginning with the words “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history…,” Copland’s Lincoln Portrait sets to music excerpts of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest documents. Too extensive to list, past luminary narrators range from Marian Anderson to Neil Armstrong, Barack Obama, Walter Cronkite, Danny Glover, Katherine Hepburn, Coretta Scott King, and Carl Sandburg. Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom is a setting of texts by Thomas Jefferson in a work created for the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth. Works by Gershwin, Bernstein and Weill top off this All-American program.

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