Description

The ECSO will tie a red-white-and-green bow around its 2024-25 season with a program of achingly romantic duets from famous Italian operas—La bohème and Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and Il trovatore and La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi—performed by soprano Sarah Joyce Cooper and Mexican-born tenor Jesús Daniel Hernández. The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus will join the orchestra for “Va, pensiero (Go, thought, on wings of gold)” from Verdi’s Nabucco, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, an anthem of Italian unification and, later, of other oppressed peoples. A special addition to the program is a version for soprano and chorus—sung by Cooper and the ECSC—of Nkeiru Okoye’s Inside Is What Remains, with a text by the composer, commissioned by Tulsa Opera for the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Memorial Concert in 2021. The orchestra will also play the stirring overtures to Verdi’s La forza del destino and Luisa Miller, the triumphal march from his Aida, and the intermezzo from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.