American Composers Orchestra opens season with Orchestra Underground: Mystics & Magic

American Composers Orchestra (ACO) presents Orchestra Underground: Mystics and Magic. The concert opens ACO’s 34th season and marks conductor George Manahan’s first time leading the orchestra as Music Director. Mystics and Magic features composers whose music channels the mysteries of the natural world - the spiritual, the divine, and the unseen. The concert features two world premieres commissioned by ACO: John Luther Adams’ The Light Within for orchestra with new, immersive lighting design by Ji-youn Chang, and Wang Jie’s From the Other Sky, a multimedia concert opera based on the composer’s own invented myth about the Chinese Zodiac. In addition, Mystics and Magic includes the New York premieres of Claude Vivier’s otherworldly Lonely Child with soprano soloist Susan Narucki, and of Brooklyn-born Alvin Singleton’s jazz and modernism-influenced BluesKonzert featuring piano soloist Ursula Oppens in an ACO homecoming (she was a founding member of the orchestra). American master Jacob Druckman’s Nor Spell Nor Charm, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, completes the program.