George Jackson

George Jackson is a conductor appearing across the Amarillo Symphony's upcoming season, leading programs that range from Tchaikovsky and Mahler symphonies to a Gershwin and jazz-inflected night and a season-closing Verdi Requiem. Listeners will hear him shape a wide spread of styles, from Copland's Americana to Janacek's brass-heavy Sinfonietta, across paired weekend performances.

Across this run of concerts, Jackson is covering an unusually broad stylistic map. There is the emotional weight of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, with its brass fanfare that opens the work and returns to disrupt it later. There is the crisp, motoric energy of John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine," built on a hammering woodblock pulse, paired later in the season with Adams' more meditative "Shaker Loops" for strings. He leads Mahler's expansive First Symphony alongside Janacek's Sinfonietta, a piece known for its opening fanfare of massed trumpets. A Gershwin-and-jazz program pairs the Piano Concerto in F with Shostakovich's satirical dance suite, and the season closes with the massed choral and orchestral forces of the Verdi Requiem. Listeners can expect a conductor comfortable moving between large-scale symphonic architecture and shorter, character-driven contemporary and concerto repertoire.