Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: Opening Night! Carmina Burana and Barber of Seville

with Robert Spano, conductor

Robert Spano, ASO Music Director

Music Director Robert Spano, currently in his eighth season as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, is recognized internationally as one of the most imaginative conductors today. Since 2001 he has invigorated and expanded the Orchestra’s repertoire while elevating the ensemble to new levels of international prominence and acclaim.

The Orchestra and audiences together explore a creative programming mix, recordings, and visual enhancements, such as Theater of a Concert, the Orchestra’s continuing exploration of different formats, settings, and enhancements for the musical performance experience, such as the first concert-staged performances of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic in November 2008. The Atlanta School of Composers reflects Mr. Spano and the Orchestra’s commitment to nurturing and championing music through multi-year partnerships defining a new generation of American composers, including Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Theofanidis, and Michael Gandolfi. Since the beginning of his tenure, Mr. Spano and the ASO have performed nearly 100 contemporary works (composed since 1950), including seven ASO-commissioned world premieres, two additional world premieres, and one U.S. premiere.

Last season, Mr. Spano conducted and recorded the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Puccini’s La Bohème, the first American recording of the opera since 1956. It was released by Telarc in conjunction with the semi-staged performance he led at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park, the Orchestra’s new state-of-the-art 12,000 seat venue in Alpharetta, Ga., where he conducted all of the orchestral concerts in the inaugural season.

Mr. Spano continues to expand the discography of the Atlanta Symphony to include the music of Atlanta School of Composers Christopher Theofanidis, Jennifer Higdon, and Michael Gandolfi, as well as John Adams, David Del Tredici, Sibelius’ Kullervo, Brahms’s Requiem, a recently-released live recording of La Bohème and the Grammy^® Award-winning recordings of Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony and Berlioz’s Requiem. Mr. Spano and the ASO have also recently recorded two discs of the music by Atlanta School of Composers Osvaldo Golijov for Deutsche Grammophon: one including Three Songs and Oceana, and the other including the chamber opera Ainadamar, which was awarded two Grammys. In 2008, Robert Spano was named Musical America Conductor of the Year.

Georgia Jarman, Soprano

Hailed by The New York Times for her “luminous, appealing and agile voice,” the young soprano, Georgia Jarman, continues to delight audiences world-wide with her charm and musicality.

The 2007-08 season began with Ms. Jarman’s recording debut as Musetta in concert performances of La Boheme with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano, to be released this summer on the TELARC label. This was followed by performances of Les Contes d’Hoffmann with the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, directed by Harry Kupfer. This spring the soprano returns to Florentine Opera as Giulietta in I Capuleti e I Montecchi and to Palm Beach Opera as Violetta in La Traviata. After this she heads back to Poland to sing Mathilde in concert performances of Guillaume Tell and then to New York to sing Elisetta in a new production of Il Matrimonio Segreto to be directed by Jonathan Miller at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Also in New York she will make her Avery Fisher Hall debut with the American Symphony Orchestra as Rozenn in Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys. She will join the Metropolitan Opera roster in the 2008-09 season.