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ABOUT JOANN FALLETTA

Multiple Grammy Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Connie and Marc Jacobson Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center and Conductor Laureate of the Hawaii Symphony. She was recently named one of the “Fifty Great Conductors”, past and present, by Gramophone Magazine, and is hailed for her work as a conductor, recording artist, audience builder and champion of American composers.
 

Philharmonic to an unprecedented level of national and international prominence. The Buffalo Philharmonic has become one of the leading recording orchestras for Naxos, with two Grammy Award-winning recordings and a 2024 Best Orchestral Performance Grammy nomination for Alexander Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy and Symphony No.2 (Naxos). In honor of Falletta’s 25th Anniversary with the BPO, NAXOS released twenty full albums of music, previously available only on Beau Fleuve CDs, across all major streaming platforms.
 


Falletta has conducted many of the world’s finest orchestras, including over a hundred orchestras in North America across 46 states. Internationally, Falletta has conducted many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, and South America, including recent and upcoming concerts in France, England, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, Croatia and Mexico. Her recent and upcoming North American guest conducting includes the National Symphony, the orchestras of Dallas, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, Nashville, Indianapolis, Houston, Milwaukee, Calgary, Vancouver, Quebec, Tulsa, Charleston, Rochester and at premier conservatories including Julliard, Curtis, Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, the Manhattan School, Mannes and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
 
 Read more at: www.joannfalletta.com.

ABOUT THE BUFFALO PHILHARMONIC

After the rise and fall of several forerunners, the BPO was founded in 1935, performing most often at the Elmwood Music Hall, which was located at Elmwood Ave. and Virginia St. and was demolished in 1938. During the Great Depression, the orchestra was initially supported by funds from the Works Progress Administration and the Emergency Relief Bureau. Over the decades, the orchestra has matured in stature under outstanding music directors including William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, and Maximiano Valdes. Many distinguished guest performers have graced the orchestra’s stage, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Isaac Stern, Aaron Copland, Van Cliburn, and Yo-Yo Ma. The Buffalo Philharmonic has issued more than 50 recordings in its history. It has toured abroad twice: a six-city European tour in 1988, and a four-city tour of Poland in 2018.

ABOUT DARON HAGEN

Daron Hagen (b. 1961) occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music and opera composer and as a pioneering auteur composer-director-writer-editor of operafilm, a genre in which he weaves together aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music, drama, film, and their performance practices to manifest narrative. Along with screenings at festivals, his Bardo Trilogy operafilms are internationally laureled and viewable worldwide on major streamers including Amazon Prime Video. His book Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy will be published in April 2026 by McFarland and Company.

Commissioned for five decades by world-class ensembles and institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Seattle Opera, his works are perennially programmed. His collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Marni Nixon, Sidney Outlaw, Gerard Schwarz, Paul Sperry, and Gore Vidal. His memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019 and receives its audiobook release in June 2025. Read more at www.daronhagen.com.

ABOUT CITY OF LIGHT

Commissioned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th anniversary as music director, with the generous support of Scott Bieler, City of Light is a tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination, whether it be the hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of one “City of Light,” Buffalo, or the crackling synapses of an Einstein’s mind — the surging intellectual and philosophical power of secular humanist insights first ginned up in another “Ville-Lumière,” Enlightenment-era Paris, or the spiritual illumination suffusing the Sufi mystic Rumi — the light that makes the shadows plain in Plato’s cave or the lightning that struck the key hanging from Benjamin Franklin’s kite — the spiritual essence of animism or the energy that powers the execution of the code sending ones and zeros back to us from the Voyager spacecraft — or the “subtle electric fire” that compels our hearts to beat.