Corigliano, Joshua Bell world premiere opens Tucson song fest

Tucson Desert Song Festival opens its second leg next week with one of the most anticipated events of the 2025 festival.

On Wednesday, April 2, renowned violinist Joshua Bell and his soprano wife Larisa Martinez will perform the world premiere of John Corigliano‘s “Tennessee Songs,” a song cycle commissioned by the festival. The performance with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music at Crowder Hall on the UA campus is sold out.

The songs are based on six Tennessee Williams poems.

“When I was looking around for a poet ... I didn’t want to do Whitman and the usual things,” Corigliano said, recalling how his composer spouse, Mark Adamo, suggested Williams. “I sent for the book of his collected poems and they are just wonderful. He’s a wonderful writer, and he’s funny and wicked and angry and mad, and he’s got so many moods in his poetry that I right away said yes, I could do this.”

Martinez called the poems jewels, each one of them “completely different, special and profound.”

“I’ve read the poems on their own and thought they were wonderful, but then with the music, it’s like, whoa,” Bell added during a phone interview last week. “It just lifts it to another (level). It describes the words in such a way that it just enhances them.”

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Corigliano will join Bell and Martinez on Tuesday, April 1, to discuss the piece during a conversation on the creative process at the University of Arizona’s Holsclaw Hall, 1017 N. Olive Road. The event starts at 5 pm. and admission is free.

The world premiere is the first of four song festival events in the next week including a recital with tenor Stephen Costello on Thursday, April 3, at Holsclaw with Arizona Opera, and Tucson Symphony Orchestra‘s performance April 4 and 6 of Carl Orff’s singular choral masterpiece “Carmina Burana,” featuring soprano Ashley Fabian, tenor Joseph Tancredi and baritone Octavio Moreno at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave.

Other events include Indigenous singer-songwriter and activist Pura Fé who joins the Grammy-winning Silkroad Ensemble performing with Arizona Arts Live at Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., on April 6; and Arizona Opera‘s innovative staging of Verdi’s “Aida” with soprano Leah Hawkins making her role debut.

This is the third year the song festival has been split into two sessions to accommodate artists’ schedules.

For more on “Tennessee Songs,” see the story in Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star.

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