If you’re up late on Saturday and want to hear some powerful classical music, the St. Paul Civic Symphony will renew St. Paul’s sister city relationship with Nagasaki, Japan, by performing a collaborative concert there that will be livestreamed on the Nagasaki Symphony’s YouTube channel at midnight central daylight time.
The two orchestras will combine their forces for this “Peace Commemorative Concert,” which will be conducted by the St. Paul Civic Symphony’s music director Jeffrey Stirling and Masanori Mikawa of the Nagasaki Symphony. The centerpiece of the program will be the Japanese premiere of a 2020 work written by St. Paul-based composer Steve Heitzeg, “Green Hope After Black Rain: Symphony for the Survivors of Manzanar, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
The concert also will feature works by Leonard Bernstein, Yuzo Toyama, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Antonín Dvořák and John Williams, and will be the culmination of the St. Paul Civic Symphony’s eight-day Japan journey.
St. Paul and Nagasaki have had a sister city relationship since 1955, with the two orchestras becoming “sister orchestras” in 1996.
