Florida’s New World Symphony is embarking on a four-day festival, “Charles Ives, Pioneer Modernist,” beginning February 19. The festival, hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas at the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach, will include a screening of T. W. Timreck’s 1977 documentary, A Good Dissonance Like a Man, a performance of the Holidays Symphony with a different conductor leading each movement, and a panel discussion with onsite and remote participants utilizing Internet2 technology. A weeklong conducting symposium, led by Tilson Thomas and James Sinclair, executive editor for the Charles Ives Society, will focus on challenges such as changes in meter and complex layering in Ives’s music. Participating conductors in the symposium will include Kazem Abdullah, an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera; Steven Jarvi, assistant conductor of the Kansas City Symphony; and Edward Abrams, a New World Symphony conducting fellow. Panel discussion participants will include Sinclair and Tilson Thomas, as well as J. Peter Burkholder, an Ives scholar who is a professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music; Wayne Shirley, former Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress; and Jan Swafford, a composer, author, and professor at Boston Conservatory. Pianist Jeremy Denk will perform the Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”) in the festival’s final performance on February 22, which will also include A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s transcription of that work for orchestra.
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