The Dorry-winning Newport Music Festival* expands its programming this year, with 43 concerts stretching across four weekends. The festival kicks off on the 4thwith a free brass concert in King Park, but one of Sunday’s two concerts is also themed around the idea of America. Six (white male) twentieth century composers are represented in The American Dream, including the expected (Gershwin, Copland) as well as pieces from Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 opera Susannah – a retelling of the apocryphal tale – and a selection from William Bolcom’s Garden of Eden, a 1969 ragtime retelling of the Adam and Eve story. Pieces from composers Alan Hovhaness and Christopher Theofanidis round out the program.
pictured [l-r]: Gershwin, Hovhaness, Floyd