The NSO’s 30th anniversary season kicks off with a program designed to showcase the orchestra in all its glory and to underscore the immense strides it has made in recent years. Strauss’s forty-minute tone poem Ein Heldenleben is replete with opulent sounds, glowing orchestration, huge climaxes, enormous energy and a veritable kaleidoscope of tonal colors. The composer himself described it as “a general and free ideal of great and manly heroism … that heroism which describes the inward battles of life, and which aspires through effort and renouncement towards the elevation of the soul.” That same spirit of heroism infuses the NSO in its rise to become one of the world’s top orchestras. Also on the program is another sumptuous score, the violin concerto by Erich Korngold, composer of many classic Hollywood film scores, and to open the program, Philharmonia Festival Overture, an NSO commission by the award-winning Taiwanese composer Nan-Chang Chien.

co-organized by International Pacing Art Culture Education Foundation