Knoxville: Summer of 1915 New York Performances

Samuel Barber’s *Knoxville: Summer of 1915* (1947) sets James Agee’s remembered childhood scene as a continuous lyric for voice and orchestra, told from a boy’s point of view as an evening settles over a Southern neighborhood. Domestic details accumulate into something elegiac, with the music moving between lullaby calm and unease. At David Geffen Hall, Golda Schultz joins the New York Philharmonic under Kwamé Ryan within a program that also frames Barber alongside Stravinsky, Ives, and a new George Lewis concerto. One reason the piece endures is its plainspoken way of turning private memory into public ritual.