Nathan Gunn, baritone and Julie Gunn, piano with the Jupiter String Quartet

Six internationally celebrated artists, performing together in their world-renowned home concert hall—this collaboration promises a very special Urbana-Champaign evening. Composer Mark Adamo's Aristotle sets the words of two-term US Poet Laureate Billy Collins—"the most popular poet in America" (The New York Times)—in a meditation on the phases of life which was commissioned by Music Accord, a consortium of top classical music presenting organizations that includes Krannert Center. Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," written as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, provides the text for a work by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon, of which The New York Times says, " . . . her setting matches and magnifies the charged emotional arc of Whitman's text, with its inexorable passion, its submerged anger and the peaceful acceptance of its final lines." Don't miss this unique alliance of artists, and this powerful melding of words and music.

Adamo: Aristotle
Tower: In Memory
Higdon: Dooryard Bloom
Works by Quilter, Moore, Barber, and others

This performance will last approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.