the FS Foundation, PBS Reno, RenoTahoe, The University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, The Carol Frank Buck Foundation, Linda and Alvaro Pascotto, Dick and Charlotte McConnell, Ian Weiss.

♪♪♪ Classical Tahoe is a festival in Incline Village, Nevada that happens every year for three weeks.

We're all from different orchestras with different styles, and we come together.

There are musicians here from San Francisco, LA, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, all over the country.

It's like an all star team.

This is an inspirational place to be.

And, getting to work with this incredible orchestra.

So, so enjoyable.

♪♪♪ The feeling is so friendly, so open and so relaxed.

Its a beautiful place to play music.

And I think the interaction between the audience members and the musicians really makes it what it is, makes it very special.

We can seat a little bit short of 400 people in our outdoor venue here.

It's a small, intimate space, it almost feels like the audience members are on stage with you.

The people that come to support us and listen to our concerts are intensely, addicted to what we do.

And they show us that love all the time.

I've made friends in the audience and it's sort of like my summer family now.

Thanks to our relationship with PBS, we've been able to bring these concerts to all over the United States The increased visibility that that brings and the reach that we have as an organization, really, expands what we're able to do.

And it's very inspiring to those of us on stage Making music anywhere is spectacular.

Here in Tahoe, getting to wake up.

Smell the pine trees.

When Vivaldi is writing in his score.

You know, the summer and his Four Seasons.

Wonderful, unique situation where you can bring so many great musicians together and have these fantastic concerts, working with great conductors, and soloists.

Every year the orchestra gets stronger and the music making gets more beautiful.

♪♪♪ [Applause] Today's program features music by Lili Boulanger, Billy Childs, and César Franck.

[Applause] ♪♪♪ We're about to hear this work by Lili Boulanger, one of the great composers of the 20th Century that we dont know.

She was absolutely on track to be one of the most influential, most beautiful composers.

She passed at the age of 25.

She had just started figuring out her own voice.

Her sister, you might know, Nadia Boulanger, one of the greatest influences of the 20th century, taught Gershwin and Philip Glass and Quincy Jones from the Michael Jackson albums.

♪♪♪ So this work by Lili Boulanger Of a Spring Morning.

You hear it?

It starts very, very, very much exactly like the title.

Just the very little cheeps of the strings.

[vocalizing] Almost like you're hearing little birds or you're hearing crickets or something.

Just the very, very, very beginning.

When the sun comes up and you hear this beautiful flute solo.

And I think it's really important to think about what spring is.

It's everything coming up, everything growing, everything going from maybe something darker and brown to something green, and how every gesture of the flute in this first opening areas.

[Vocalizing] Everything is going up.

Everything is, enlightening and joyous, and it's all about potential energy.

♪♪♪ [Applause] ♪♪♪ My name is Stephen Banks, and Im here with the Classical Tahoe Orchestra.

and will be performing Billy Childs Diaspora, a concerto for saxophone and orchestra.

This piece for for me, I feel like it's probably one of the most important projects that I've been a part of.

it was commissioned by a consortium of ten major American orchestras, which is the largest number of orchestras to ever commissioned a saxophone piece.

♪♪♪ Billy Child's Concerto Diaspora, which was written for Stephen Banks, is a really amazing piece.

And Stephen Banks is doing such an amazing job with it.

You'll hear it's so difficult, so virtuosic, he brings so much depth to it.

♪♪♪ Billy Childs uses the piece to chronicle the Black American experience.

So it starts, on the shores of West Africa and looks forward into the future.

each movement is inspired by poem from black poet.

the first movement is inspired by poem by Nayyirah Waheed.

the second movement, a poem by Claude McKay.

And the third, a poem by Maya Angelou.

♪♪♪ It's very descriptive.

You can hear kind of everything is happy in the beginning its easy going, but then there's danger arriving.

The ships are coming, the slaves are being taken away on the ships.

So, you can really feel the waves and the music.

The second movement is, I think the centerpiece.

Theres a lot of battle, a lot of difficulties, struggles with families being separated, all those horrible things.

But the third movement kind of brings us back to hope.

That out of all this, they can still rise again.

♪♪♪ The vast majority of people have never heard of classical saxophone.

Just after rehearsal today the first thing someone said that was nice.

I'd love to hear you play some jazz.

[Laughs] The saxophone was invented, well patented in 1846, which is well before jazz existed.

Adolphe Sax was trying to invent an instrument that would, but have the digital flexibility of woodwinds, but with the tonal power of brass.

And I am excited to introduce this audience to the classical saxophone.

And I think it has such a wide range of capabilities, and it's what I've dedicated my life to.

♪♪♪ As a saxophone player, people may not realize that the altitude really affects, how my lungs work.

So I had to get here a little bit early to get used to that.

And it also changes the way that our reeds work a little bit, too.

Performing this piece here, it's really exciting because I've played the Child's concerto, I'd say many times at this point, but doing it in an outside venue in this kind of atmosphere always gives it a little bit of a different feeling than, than in a concert hall.

And so I like the feeling of taking the same piece and putting in all these different contexts.

Thats exciting.

♪♪♪ [Applause] ♪♪♪ [Applause] ♪♪♪ Funding for this program has been provided by the FS Foundation, PBS Reno, RenoTahoe, The University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, The Carol Frank Buck Foundation, Linda and Alvaro Pascotto, Dick and Charlotte McConnell, Ian Weiss.