Harry Connick Jr. to premiere composition at Carnegie Hall for 100th anniversary of mother’s birth

By Canadian Press on February 12, 2025.

NEW YORK (AP) — Harry Connick Jr. will premiere a composition for the 100th anniversary of his mother’s birth for Carnegie Hall’s 2025-26 season, which celebrates the Declaration of Independence with a festival titled: “United in Sound: America at 250.”

Connick has tentatively titled the work “Elaboratio,” wanting to musically elaborate on his mother’s life. He will play piano in the performance for his Carnegie main stage debut on May 22, 2026, exactly 100 years after the birth of Anita Frances Livingston. The program is to be repeated the following night.

His manager called Carnegie Hall executive director Clive Gillinson seven years ago to reserve the date.

“I just wanted to do something that I think would have made her proud and and honor her memory by performing in a place that she always wanted me to play and to write something that’ll last forever in her honor,” Connick said during an interview after Wednesday’s news conference.

Connick’s mother died in 1981, when he was 13.

He is still composing the work, which will have three movements about each of the places she lived: New York; Nouaceur, Morocco; and New Orleans.

His only Carnegie appearance has been in the smaller Zankel Hall in 2005.

Carnegie’s festival runs from January to July and will include at least 35 performances. Works by Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Philip Glass, Wynton Marsalis and Julia Wolfe are featured as well as underrepresented composers such as Amy Beach, Florence Price and William Dawson. Jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, Broadway and bluegrass are among the genres.

A March 2 concert starring J. Harrison Ghee and Betsy Wolf will feature “The Secret Life of the American Musical,” based on Jack Viertel’s book on the making of Broadway shows.

Conductor Marin Alsop, pianist Lang Lang, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and violinist Maxim Vengerov will be the artists of Carnegie’s Perspectives series. Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 in September, will hold the Debs Composer’s Chair but will be not travel to New York because of his age, Gillinson said.

In the first of more than 170 concerts, conductor Daniel Harding leads opening night on Oct. 7 with alumni of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America and pianist Yuja Wang. The program includes Bernstein’s selections from symphonic dances from “West Side Story,” Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto No. 1 and Stravinsky’s “The Firebird Suite.”

Ronald Blum, The Associated Press

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