Rufus Wainwright with the Minnesota Orchestra

Rufus Wainwright, vocals and piano | Sarah Hicks, conductor

Live at Orchestra Hall

Saturday, December 2, 2017, 8 pm | Orchestra Hall

The program for tonight’s concert will be announced from the stage. There will be one intermission.

Rufus Wainwrightdec 2

Rufus Wainwright, one of the great male vocalists, composers and songwriters of hisgeneration, has released eight studio albums, three DVDs and three live albums.He has collaborated with artists ranging from Elton John, David Byrne, RobbieWilliams, Mark Ronson and Joni Mitchell to Burt Bacharach. His album Rufus DoesJudy, recorded at Carnegie Hall in 2006, was nominated for a Grammy Award.

His acclaimed first opera, Prima Donna, premiered at the Manchester International Festival in July 2009 and has since been presented in London,Toronto and BAM in New York. This summer it will be performed at the ArmelOpera Festival in Hungary and Augsburg Theatre in Germany. In 2015, DeutscheGrammophon released a studio recording of the opera recorded with the BBCSymphony Orchestra.

Rufus celebrated Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death with the release of his latest album Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets on DeutscheGrammophon, made available worldwide in spring 2016. The Canadian Opera Company commissioned Wainwright’s second opera, about Roman EmperorHadrian, to be premiered in Toronto in the fall of 2018. More: rufuswainwright.com.

Sarah Hicks, the Minnesota Orchestra’s principal conductor of Live at Orchestra Hall, has led a broad range of programs since joining the Orchestra as assistant conductor in 2006. During the 2017-18 season, she conducts Orchestra performances with Ben Folds, Pink Martini, Cloud Cult and Cirque dela Symphonie, a brand-new “Home for the Holidays” program conceived and directed by Peter Rothstein and written by Kevin Kling, the Inside the Classicsseries and film music concerts including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets™. She debuts this season with the Calgary Symphony and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. She has recently conducted the San FranciscoSymphony, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and San Diego Symphony, and debutedwith the major orchestras in Melbourne, Brisbane, Montreal, Toronto and Lisbon. More: minnesotaorchestra.org.

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