This past May, Anthony Parnther returned to the podium for Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera The Central Park Five at the Detroit Opera. With a libretto by Richard Wesley, the powerful work recounts the wrongful conviction of five Black and Latino teens in 1989.
The Detroit Free Press wrote of the performance, “Conductor Anthony Parnther works wonders with the Detroit Opera Orchestra and Davis’ muscular, jazz-heavy score… The score begins with blistering chords that sound like shattering glass. With that, Parnther takes off and never looks back; it’s hard to imagine this show without him at the baton.”
After returning to Music Academy of the West to lead Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, Parnther returns to the Cleveland Orchestra for an outdoor concert, then to San Bernardino for a July 4th spectacular, before heading to Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival where he leads works by Bruckner, Brahms, and Margaret Bonds, joined by soprano Janai Brugger and baritone Sankara Harouna on July 11 & 12.
Later in the summer he will conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra (July 24), San Francisco Symphony (July 25) and the San Diego Symphony (August 17), where he will conduct an evening with Cynthia Erivo and Marvel. He closes out the summer at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival (August 29), conducting another installment of the Infinity Saga.