Mount Vernon Virtuosi's season closes with a concert honoring Maryland's vibrant artistic heritage, bringing together composers connected to our state and music inspired by one of Baltimore's greatest literary voices.
The program opens with Peabody Professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning Kevin Puts's Credo for String Orchestra, music of quiet conviction from a composer with deep Maryland roots. From there, the evening turns to André Caplet's Conte fantastique for harp and strings, a shimmering, atmospheric work inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death—a fitting nod to the writer who spent his final years, and is buried, right here in Baltimore.
The evening culminates in something entirely new: the world premiere of the winning composition from the Mount Vernon Virtuosi 2027 Maryland Composer Competition. Selected from submissions by composers across the state, this piece represents the next chapter of Maryland's musical story—written not about our creative spirit, but from within it.
A program that looks to our state's past and present in equal measure, closing the season with music that could only have been made here.
Amit Peled, direction