Two world premieres, two nights, one stage. Rice University's Shepherd School of Music opens its 2026-27 orchestral season Sept. 25-26 with back-to-back concerts in Stude Concert Hall, each showcasing a work no audience has heard before.
Miguel Harth-Bedoya, distinguished resident director of orchestras and professor of conducting, leads both programs. The Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra performs Sept. 25 and the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra follows Sept. 26. Both concerts begin at 7:30 p.m.
Friday’s centerpiece is “Soft as the Massacre of Suns,” a set of Emily Dickinson-inspired fantasies for oboe and orchestra by American composer Jeremy Gill, commissioned by the Shepherd School and supported by the Office of Research. Erin Hannigan, professor of oboe, is the soloist in her first concerto appearance with a Shepherd School orchestra.
The premiere continues a collaboration that began decades ago at the Eastman School of Music where Hannigan was a graduate student and Gill, a composition student a few years younger, took oboe lessons from her teacher. Years later, as principal oboe of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Hannigan commissioned Gill’s “Serenada Concertante.”
“Jeremy always sends a letter with his composition that talks about his thinking in creating the piece,” Hannigan said. “He wrote, ‘You’ll notice this piece is completely different from the first concerto. I seem to be allergic to writing the same way twice.’”
Hannigan received the finished score in mid-June. Dickinson’s imagery, she said, gives the oboe plenty to do.
“There are some technical moments but many just gorgeously atmospheric moments where the audience should completely feel what’s going on,” Hannigan said. “There’s a movement about butterflies, and the whole movement is fluttering the entire time.”
The chamber orchestra opens the evening with Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit,” a surrealist romp built on Brazilian dance rhythms and closes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.
“Symphonic Transformations” on Saturday brings the second premiere: “Probabolophony” by Jake Berran, a 2026 Master of Music graduate in composition and winner of the Shepherd School’s 2026 Cooper Prize. Named for founding faculty member Paul Cooper, the prize is awarded annually to an orchestral thesis or dissertation and carries a performance on a Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra concert. Berran, now a Pittsburgh-based composer, pianist and conductor, has written a work that moves in and out of tonality.
The symphony orchestra surrounds it with three studies in reinvention: Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso,” Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” and Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.”
Tickets for each concert start at $5 and are available online. Both performances will also be livestreamed for free.