Chloé Van Soeterstède

Chloé Van Soeterstède is a conductor appearing with the Jacksonville Symphony in a program pairing Anna Clyne's This Midnight Hour with Britten's Sea Interludes and Rachmaninoff's First Symphony. Listeners can expect a well-paced evening moving from a contemporary orchestral tone poem through evocative seascapes to a big, dramatic Russian symphony.

This program is built around contrast and atmosphere. Anna Clyne's This Midnight Hour opens with restless, shadowy orchestral color, setting a nocturnal mood before the concert shifts to Britten's four Sea Interludes, orchestral snapshots drawn from his opera Peter Grimes that conjure dawn light on water, a bustling harbor, and a storm at sea through shifting instrumental textures. The second half turns to Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1, a work full of dark, surging string melodies and brass outbursts, written by a young composer before his later, more famous scores. A conductor leading this sequence needs to shape long melodic lines and control the buildup of tension across three very different sound worlds, from Clyne's atmosphere to Britten's pictorial detail to Rachmaninoff's full-throttle Romanticism.