The first part of Jimmy López Bellido​’s Symphony No.4 (Eclipse), entitled I: First Contact, receives its world premiere from 26 – 28 April with Houston Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada. Commissioned by the orchestra, First Contact marks the total solar eclipse that took place across North America on 8 April 2024. The symphony will eventually comprise three movements, with each premiere performance coinciding with a total solar eclipse in a different part of the world.

First Contact receives four performances, including a matinee concert on 27 April. The programme also includes Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The commission marks a return to Houston Symphony for López, who was Composer-in-Residence with the orchestra from 2017 to 2020.

Discussing the inspiration behind the work, López says:

“First Contact draws us into the crucial first moments of the eclipse, when the Moon takes its first nibble out of the solar disk. Little by little — as the Moon takes over, increasingly blocking the Sun’s light — our pupils dilate, and the color of the sky and landscape begin to change. As we get closer to totality, solar rays are only allowed through an ever-thinner sliver of the sun. As a result, objects around us become sharper, and animals start to behave strangely, as if settling into the night…

Witnessing a total solar eclipse can be an exhilarating, cathartic, and life-changing experience. They have the power to stir our deepest emotions, bring us to tears, and awaken feelings of kinship and interconnectedness with the cosmos. In this piece I have strived not only to paint in music the different stages of an eclipse, but also the emotions elicited by it.” – Jimmy López Bellido