Lecturer Gregory Spears Premieres “Love Story”

In an early February performance of the New York Philharmonic at Alice Tully Hall, the world premiere of “Love Story” by Lecturer Gregory Spears earned praise. Commisioned by the New York Philharmonic, the work is inspired by a poem by 22nd US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

“His [countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo] heated, endearing earnestness had a better showcase in Gregory Spears’s new “Love Story.” A “Groundhog Day” of a piece, it sets the same Tracy K. Smith poem about a relationship’s ending four times in a row, treating it with a consonant wash, then quiet ambivalence, then a shining brass chorale and, finally, dusky resolution.”

Read the entire New York Times piece.

Gregory Spears is a New York-based composer whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe).