L’Arrivée: Three Firsts in the Vieux Carré
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter
Concert - 7:30 p.m. | Pre-concert talk - 6:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Musical Louisiana: America’s Cultural Heritage, presented annually by The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, is both a concert for music lovers and an educational experience for students.
The 16th edition of this program will revive three significant bodies of work that arrived and were performed in New Orleans prior to statehood, a celebration of three firsts in the Vieux Carré. This concert will highlight rarely performed selections from materials found within The Historic New Orleans Collection archives: the Ursuline Music Manuscript (1736), André Grétry's opera Silvain (1770), and Francois Devienne’s Les Visitandines (1792). Conducted by LPO Music Director and Principal Conductor Matthew Kraemer, this program will feature the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in collaboration with two virtuosic chamber ensembles that specialize in early music repertoire: Variant 6 and Filament.
Matthew Kraemer will deliver a preconcert talk just prior to the program at 6:30 p.m. at St. Louis Cathedral.
Concert Livestream
Watch a recorded stream of the concert below, courtesy of WLAE-TV.
About Musical Louisiana
Since 2007 Musical Louisiana: America’s Cultural Heritage has been copresented by The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. It was founded by THNOC’s late director of the Williams Research Center, Alfred E. Lemmon, as a free, educational concert for music lovers in New Orleans and throughout the state.
Dedicated to the study of Louisiana’s contributions to the world of classical music, the award-winning series reaches an audience of more than 30,000 individuals through live radio broadcasts and online video streaming of the concert. In addition, the accompanying program is distributed to the sixty-eight library systems of the State Library of Louisiana, university libraries, music history instructors in Louisiana, and centers throughout the United States concentrating on the study of American music.
Since the program’s inception, Musical Louisiana has garnered both local and national recognition. The 2008 presentation, “Music of the Mississippi,” won the Big Easy Award for Arts Education; “Made in Louisiana” (2009) received an Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; “Identity, History, Legacy: La Société Philharmonique” (2011) received an American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and “Envisioning Louisiana” (2013) won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support its educational component. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made possible the streaming of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 concerts. The 2014 program, “Postcards from Paris,” attracted viewers in ten countries and reached 26,000 listeners through public radio broadcasts.
Support
We invite you to support the Musical Louisiana series through a voluntary donation. More information is available by calling (504) 598-7109.