Building on the success of the Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Omar, which premiered at Spoleto Festival USA in 2022, the Festival presented the world premiere of composer Michael Abels’s new cello concerto, Rhapsody on Omar, during its 2026 season.
Grammy-winning cellist Zuill Bailey joined the Festival Orchestra for the May 24, 2026 premiere, performing the new concerto under the baton of music director Timothy Myers at the Charleston Gaillard Center. Myers described Bailey as “one of the most sought-after soloists of his generation,” underscoring the significance of his participation in the premiere. The four-movement concerto anchored a program built around Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and also featured Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict Overture, led by conductor Mariana Corichi Gomez.
Rhapsody on Omar draws on musical themes and material from Omar, the acclaimed opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels that was commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA and premiered at the Festival in 2022. Rather than retelling the opera’s narrative, the concerto transforms its musical language into a sweeping symphonic work for cello and orchestra, offering a fresh perspective on the themes that made Omar such a landmark achievement.
Cultural Voice of North Carolina praised the concerto premiere as “an unprecedented outpouring of catchy, contemporary, and contemplative sound,” noting that the audience “broke into an appreciative ovation when Bailey raised his bow for the first time.” The review also lauded the Festival Orchestra as “among the most elite youth orchestras on the planet.”
The premiere further extended the artistic legacy of Omar, which centers the story of Omar Ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim scholar whose autobiography remains one of the few known firsthand accounts written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. Commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA in 2017, Omar premiered on May 27, 2022, and went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023, cementing its place as one of the most celebrated works in the Festival’s history.