Programme

Bernstein Symphony No. 2 The Age of Anxiety

Giancarlo Guerrero Conductor
Joyce Yang Piano

For Grammy Award-winning conductor Giancarlo Guerrero’s NZSO debut, he presents Bernstein's second symphony.

Pianist Joyce Yang, the burgeoning piano superstar, brings her “poetic and sensitive pianism” (Washington Post) to the six-part virtuoso symphony for solo piano and orchestra.

In 1947, British-American poet W. H. Auden wrote a long poem called The Age of Anxiety. In this poem, four characters meet in a bar, each consumed by insecurity and the worries of the day. Though critics later panned the poem, it nevertheless struck an intense chord among some, winning the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of post-World War II city life. It certainly rang deeply true for Leonard Bernstein. In an essay, Bernstein described Auden’s poem as “fascinating and hair-raising … one of the most shattering examples of virtuosity in the history of British poetry”. A friend suggested that Bernstein write a piece based on the Auden poem and thus Bernstein’s Second Symphony, subtitled The Age of Anxiety, was born.