ASO Masterworks: American Ground

Christopher Confessore leads the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in a program devoted entirely to American voices. Copland’s Appalachian Spring is the cornerstone of the evening — a ballet score that has come to sound like the American landscape itself: open and unhurried, rooted in Shaker melodies. Florence Price’s Dances in the Canebrakes brings a different American tradition to the stage, drawing on Black folk idioms with elegance and rhythmic vitality. John Adams’ The Chairman Dances offers a wry, minimalist portrait of Nixon-era diplomacy, and Howard Hanson’s Second Symphony — the “Romantic” — closes the concert’s first half, sending the audience to Intermission with an emotional directness that was radical for its time.