The Haunting Imagery of
Florent Schmitt

About JoAnn Falletta

JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony and is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center of North Carolina. She has guest conducted over a hundred orchestras in North America, and many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. She served as Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 2011 to 2014, with whom she made her début at London’s prestigious Proms with the orchestra and recorded music of Gustav Holst, E.J. Moeran and John Knowles Paine. Recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, winner of the Stokowski Competition, and the Toscanini, Ditson and Bruno Walter conducting awards, Falletta has also received twelve ASCAP awards and served on the U.S. National Council on the Arts. A champion of American music, she has presented over five hundred works by American composers including 110 world premières. Her Naxos recordings include the double GRAMMY® Award-winning disc of works by John Corigliano and GRAMMY® nominated discs of works by Tyberg, Dohnányi, Fuchs, Schubert, Respighi, Gershwin, Hailstork and Holst.

About the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

Founded in 1935, the GRAMMY® Award-winning Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Music Director JoAnn Falletta, is Buffalo’s leading cultural ambassador and presents more than 120 Classics, Pops and Youth Concerts each year. Since 1940, the orchestra’s permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Landmark, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, one of the finest concert halls in the United States. The BPO has toured widely across the United States, Europe and Canada, including the Florida Friends Tours with JoAnn Falletta in 2010 and in 2014. The BPO performed at Carnegie Hall as a participant in the Spring For Music festival in 2013, as one of five orchestras selected from a national field. This was the orchestra’s 24th appearance at Carnegie Hall and its first since its performance there under JoAnn Falletta in June 2004. Over the decades, the BPO has matured in stature under some leading conductors, including William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Maximiano Valdés, Semyon Bychkov and Julius Rudel. During the tenure of JoAnn Falletta, the BPO has rekindled its distinguished history of radio broadcasts and recordings, including the release of 32 new CDs of a highly diverse repertoire on the Naxos and Beau Fleuve labels. The Philharmonic’s Naxos recording of composer John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (8.559331), featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, won GRAMMYs® in two categories of the three for which it was nominated: Classical Vocal Performance and Classical Contemporary Composition.