Kelly Kuo, music director and conductor of the orchestra, says that 'This entire concert, for me, is filled with nostalgia.' The five pieces on the program include the Symphony No. 3, subtitled 'The Band Meeting,' by Charles Ives, in which Ives reminisces musically about the camp meetings he attended as a youth – Ives's way, according to Kuo, of 'returning to the past.'
Composer Samuel Barber, in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915, sets to music a James Agee prose poem in which Agee likewise remembers his early years in Tennessee. 'Barber is exactly the same age as James Agee,' says Kuo, 'and so his ability to recognize and feel everything that the author was feeling when he wrote this story' comes through in the music.
Soprano Jacqueline Echols will perform Barber's work with the Reno Chamber Orchestra. She will also sing the aria “When They Ask Me to Stand, Will I?” from the opera She Who Dared by Jasmine Barnes, whose subject is the women – including Rosa Parks, whom Echols plays in the aria – who helped desegregate the Montgomery bus system in the 1950s.
The Reno Chamber Orchestra co-commissioned another piece on the program, I Have Seen the Future by Matt Browne. His music takes its inspiration, says Kuo, from 'the film and TV scores of the 1960s and 1970s.' The work's five movements are 'inspired by writings about AI, artificial intelligence, throughout the years', which 'is particularly powerful now.'
The Reno Chamber Orchestra's program concludes with Farm Journal, composed in the 1940s by Douglas Moore, which Kuo says draws from a documentary film, for which Moore wrote the music, 'about a small farm community in Southern Ohio. So it's all music that is nostalgic and familiar from that time period.'
The Reno Chamber Orchestra's program 'Barber: American Voices' is presented on Saturday and Sunday, February 28 and March 1, 2026, at the University of Nevada, Reno's Nightingale Concert Hall. renochamberorchestra.org for more.
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Support for 'Arts on the Airwaves' comes from The Nevada Arts Council… a state agency that provides public funding and support to artists and organizations, that benefit Nevadans in cities and rural communities statewide. More at NVArtsCouncil.org.
