The evening-length oratorio uses Adam Smith’s seminal 1776 treatise on economics, The Wealth Of Nations, as inspiration to explore wealth, money, commerce, and exchange in a format that self-consciously references the form of Handel’s Messiah.
Critics across the board have praised Lang’s composition and the orchestra’s stellar performances!
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David Lang has a clarity and honesty in his music that I deeply admire. There’s a fearlessness to his writing that strips things down to their essence, and that transparency creates enormous power and focus in the room. What excited me about the wealth of nations is its audacity. This is a piece that encourages us to consider economics as a human story, full of consequences, contradictions, and moral weight rather than a set of inevitable systems. It invites us to question not only how societies function, but who they are meant to serve.
— Instagram: Gustavo Dudamel, Music & Artistic Director Designate, New York Philharmonic
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Lang has a gift for finding epiphanic poetry in texts that may seem mundane or downright boring. He is also one of the most gently political composers today, allergic to polemics but constantly wrestling with big questions. His melodies are like plainchant, unremarkable on their own but elevated by the richness of his harmonies, which contain the bottomless compassion that his scores are known for.
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The score itself is one of Lang’s most inviting, the culmination of decades of artistic growth. His style, however defined, is ideally suited to a piece about economics: it ticks along busily but unpredictably, like a vast mechanical system with a persistent and unsettling malfunction. Using the huge resources of large orchestra, chorus, and dual vocal soloists to create a work of depth and variety unprecedented in his career to date, veering from rich and pleasant to icy and stark. The result is dramatically thrilling, like if Carmina Burana had been written as an arch American oratorio about socialism instead of a Nazi oratorio about nothing in particular.
I hope that this piece, a high point of Lang’s body of work, makes its way into the standard repertoire. The surprising beauty of the text, the compelling drama of the music, and the perennial relevance of the theme fairly beg for numerous revivals.
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The score, written in Lang’s patented minimalism-adjacent musical language, is thoroughly accessible, turning the work’s ideas into sound. It opens (in “Sinfony” – one of its two purely instrumental movements) with glinting figures in the vibraphone, glockenspiel and violins. They sound like coins falling from the sky and help define the wealth of nations’ mercantile realm.
The soloists made the texts hit home, abetted by how the deft orchestral continuity supported and enhanced the vocal lines.
The Philharmonic’s audience has historically resisted new music, but here the crowd cheered as if encountering an old favorite.
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Lang’s music is a powerful guide. Watching the wealth of nations is like going on a journey into the heart of the economy.
Lang’s the wealth of nations was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic — following his receipt of the 2025 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music — and the Aspen Music Festival and School, who gives the Colorado premiere August 1, 2026 with Fleur Barron, Davóne Tines, the Aspen Chamber Orchestra and Kantorei chorus, conducted by Teddy Abrams.
For more information about this work, or any of David Lang’s music, please contact us!
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