Celebrate the holidays with Mount Vernon Virtuosi in a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere filled with warmth, joy, and music from diverse traditions and cultures.
Holiday in Jeans brings together festive sounds old and new, a program meant to feel like gathering with friends as much as attending a concert.
The evening opens with Arcangelo Corelli's beloved Christmas Concerto, its gentle Pastorale a fixture of the season since 1690 and a reminder that holiday music-making is itself a centuries-old tradition.
From there, the program turns to a Muslim-inspired tune by Uzbekistan composer Jakhongir Shukur, featuring our own concertmaster Sofiya Lavchenko as soloist—a piece that widens the evening's sense of "holiday" beyond a single culture, drawing on melodic traditions that add fresh color to the season's usual sounds.
The night closes with Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1. Swiss-born and Jewish, Bloch brings Hanukkah into this season of lights alongside Christmas and other traditions being celebrated—his music deeply engaged with his own heritage even as this particular work looks to the past, rooted in Baroque forms but unmistakably twentieth-century in its harmonic language and drive.
Three composers, three centuries, three cultures, one season: a program built on the idea that the holidays are for everyone, enjoyed together in good company.
Amit Peled, direction