Beginning with the words “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history…,” Copland’s Lincoln Portrait sets to music excerpts of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest documents. Too extensive to list, past luminary narrators range from Marian Anderson to Neil Armstrong, Barack Obama to Walter Cronkite, Danny Glover to Katherine Hepburn, and Coretta Scott King to Carl Sandburg. Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom is a setting of texts by Thomas Jefferson in a work created for the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth. Works by Gershwin, Bernstein and Weill top off this All-American program.
