Preview: ‘Pasadena Symphony to Close Its Season Saturday with an American Survey’

Alec Baldwin narrates Copland and Terrence Wilson takes up Gershwin, in a finale shaped to the nation's 250th

PASADENA — Pasadena Now has published a preview of the Pasadena Symphony’s 2025-26 season finale, the second under Music Director Brett Mitchell:

For its season finale, the Pasadena Symphony has set aside the European masterworks that usually close a year and turned toward home. “America@250,” the program it brings to Ambassador Auditorium on Saturday, surveys roughly a century of American orchestral writing, timed to the country’s 250th birthday — and it caps a season that the orchestra’s music director, Brett Mitchell, built around American composition, old and new. 

The afternoon’s gravitational center is Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” which closes the program. Copland wrote it in 1942, on a commission from the conductor André Kostelanetz, who — with the United States freshly in the war — wanted musical portraits of eminent Americans. The piece sets Lincoln’s own words, the Gettysburg Address among them, over an orchestra that climbs from a hush to a blaze, with fragments of period tunes such as “Camptown Races” woven through. It calls for a single speaker, and over the decades that part has drawn an improbable range of voices: Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, and Copland himself. 

On Saturday the voice belongs to Alec Baldwin, who has spoken the part before, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He inherits a role written in 1942 as wartime reassurance, revived here for a very different national milestone. 

The concerto is Terrence Wilson’s. The Grammy-nominated pianist — a Bronx native and Juilliard graduate who teaches at Bard College — plays Gershwin’s Concerto in F, and he arrives by way of a late change to the bill: Wilson replaces Joyce Yang, who is recovering from an injury and had been set to give the West Coast premiere of a new Jonathan Leshnoff work. In its place stands Gershwin’s 1925 concerto, written for the conductor Walter Damrosch after the success of “Rhapsody in Blue” to show that jazz could fill the three-movement concert form — and the first large score Gershwin orchestrated entirely on his own. 

The program opens with John Williams’s “Liberty Fanfare,” a brass flourish composed in 1986 for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, and takes in the suite from Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” the 1944 Martha Graham ballet whose closing variations on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” have become a kind of shorthand for the American pastoral. Set end to end, the four works trace one idea of the national sound — fanfare, jazz, frontier, elegy. 

Mitchell, in his second season as music director, called Baldwin and Wilson two “extraordinary artists” and said he “couldn’t be more excited to share the stage” with them for the season’s close. 

With the finale, Mitchell closes a season given over to American music of the last century.

To read the complete preview, please click here.