About the project
Since 2016, EXO has partnered with Young Patrons of Lincoln Center to produce several party-concerts, each focused on a particular piece of music or composer. In one concert, excerpts from all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies were performed back-to-back, giving listeners a trajectory of those pieces of music as they trace through his creative life; another featured a performance of Dvorak’s 8th Symphony in surround sound.
Each of these concerts have expanded on the ways that EXO can provide a full-body, immersive concert experience, with audience members embedded within the orchestra, with the orchestra surrounding the audience by playing along all four walls, and more.
This blog post about our 2016 concert is a wonderful description of these events
FEATURED COLLABORATORS
The world-première recording of “The Prison,” a choral symphony written in 1930 by the English composer Ethel Smyth, arrives as demands for a more representative, equitable canon are mounting. For too long, Smyth has been relegated to footnote status: an ardent suffragist who was jailed for her efforts and a prominent lesbian, she wrote what was, until 2016, the only work by a female composer to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera (“Der Wald,” in 1903). “The Prison” exerts a metaphysical gravity, not just because of the text by Henry Brewster but also because Smyth’s music calls to mind Brahms, Elgar, and even Mahler at their most visionary and searching. The conductor James Blachly elicits splendid work from the vocal soloists, Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton, and from the Experiential Orchestra and Chorus.
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