Bank of America®

Founded in 1891, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest orchestras. Bank of America has partnered with the CSO for more than a decade, becoming the Global Sponsor in the historic 2010/11 season, as Maestro Riccardo Muti began his tenure as music director. As Global Sponsor, we have embarked on the most significant sponsorship in CSO history, providing unprecedented support for the orchestra's concerts and events at home and abroad. The CSO’s dynamic season is complemented by performances by the world’s most esteemed artists from all cultures and in all genres.

The CSO is a leader in music education and community engagement, offering some of the most innovative programs of any U.S. orchestra. The CSO’s Institute for Learning, Access and Training offers 20 programs that reach more than 200,000 people each year—fostering children’s cognitive development and creative growth, offering training to young musicians and providing access for all. Acclaimed worldwide, the CSO has performed sold-out concerts on five continents during more than 30 international tours. CSO radio broadcasts reach 20 million listeners each year via 260 terrestrial stations, satellite radio and web download. The CSO has earned 62 Grammy® Awards, more than any other individual or ensemble in history. In 2007 the orchestra launched its own record label, CSO Resound. Recordings on this label have four won Grammy® Awards, including Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance and Best Choral Performance.

The 2012/13 season offers performances of classical works by composers such as Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Stravinsky, and features a Wagner bicentennial program. In addition, The CSO is featured on the soundtrack of the film Lincoln, from DreamWorks Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, in association with Participant Media, and directed by Steven Spielberg. The CSO, along with Members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, recorded renowned composer John Williams’ original score at Orchestra Hall in Chicago in May 2012.

Major funding for The Met: HD Live in Schools is made possible by Bank of America, with program support provided through a partnership with the New York City Department of Education. This nationwide initiative that provides students, teachers, and administrators with educational resources tied to select live transmissions of Metropolitan Opera performances, will connect with more students and teachers in its fifth season than ever before.

Since the program launched nationally in 2008, it has reached more than 55,000 students across the United States. The program, which uses opera to teach music, theater, history, and English Language Arts, will reach approximately 15,000 students in 29 school districts across the country. In-class workshops prepare students to attend live movie theater transmissions of operas, direct from the Met stage, and make connections between the operas and other subjects in the school curriculum.

This season’s featured operas are Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and three operas by Verdi: Otello, Aida, and Rigoletto. Each opera was chosen based on a mixture of factors, including the opera’s applicability to general curriculum, scheduling with school calendars, and entertainment value.

Bank of America is the Global Sponsor of the monumental exhibition that captures the power of Pop with works of art as fresh and revolutionary as they were 50 years ago. The most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Roy Lichtenstein features more than 160 of his works created between 1950 and 1997, from the familiar to the completely unexpected. After opening at the Art Institute of Chicago and traveling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the exhibition will continue on to the Tate Modern, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The last full survey of the artist’s body of work was done in 1993. In Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, the first major exhibition since the artist’s death in 1997, more than 100 of his greatest paintings from all periods of his career are presented along with a selection of related drawings and sculptures. The exhibition presents Lichtenstein's expansive legacy, including the classic early pop paintings based on advertisements and comic-book treatments of war and romance, his versions of paintings by the modern masters, and series including Brushstrokes, Mirrors, Artist's Studios, Nudes, and Landscapes in the Chinese Style. The exhibition was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Lichtenstein is a figure of great significance in the recent history of art. His contribution—the still-potent collision of commercial, mass-market imagery and fine art—defines the enduring legacy of Pop Art. In restating the mass-produced image by means of a meticulous, painterly process, he confounded the notion of the readymade and forever expanded and altered our understanding of how a painting can be made, how it should look, and how we define the artist in our society.

With generous support from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, The Royal Opera House (ROH), London, has launched the third successful season of its cinema program. Some of the world’s best-loved operas and ballets from the Royal Opera House have been screened live and recorded for cinemas across the world this season. With High Definition and 5.1 Surround-Sound, it’s as if you’re sitting in an orchestra seat. The 2012/13 Cinema Season of nine titles from the world-renowned Covent Garden stage, now in over 900 cinemas across 32 countries, the Royal Opera House Cinema Season continues to expand each year.

A live performance of Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet Swan Lake opened the Royal Opera House Live Cinema Season on October 23, 2012. This season’s lineup of opera and ballet includes four new opera productions, featuring Verdi’s masterwork Nabucco with Plácido Domingo making his role debut. Featuring some of the greatest choral music ever written, Nabucco’s premiere in 1842 confirmed Verdi as the major new force in Italian opera. Kasper Holten, The Royal Opera’s Director of Opera, makes his ROH directorial debut with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with British baritone Simon Keenlyside in the title role; Rossini’s Donna del Lago stars Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Colin Lee; and Britten’s Gloriana, marking three major anniversaries: the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation for which the opera was composed, and the 60th anniversary of the premiere at Covent Garden stars Susan Bullock in the role of Queen Elizabeth I and Toby Spence as the Earl of Essex.

The Nutcracker is a perennial holiday family favorite, with its intoxicating score by Tchaikovsky, a Christmas tree that magically seems to grow, a fierce battle between the toy soldiers and the army of mice led by the Mouse King, and the famous dance of The Sugar Plum Fairy performed by Roberta Marquez, with Steven McRae as the Prince. A ballet version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with choreography by Christopher Wheeldon and music by Joby Talbot, will be screened live to cinemas and was a sell-out success when it premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2011.

Watch a preview from the Royal Opera House Cinema 2012-13 Season

The popular exhibitions and programs of the MoMA Series at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, are made possible by Presenting Sponsor Bank of America. Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 explores the development of modern and contemporary art by selecting key years in art history that also represent watershed moments in the twentieth century. Fast Forward, on view from October 13, 2012, through January 20, 2013, is the latest exhibition presented as part of an ongoing collaboration between The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the High Museum of Art. It is one of the largest surveys of twentieth-century art to ever be exhibited in the southeastern United States.

Fast Forward continues a multi-year, multi-exhibition partnership between the two museums, which began in 2009 with Monet Water Lilies, the first in a series of six exhibitions, followed by Modern by Design in summer 2011 and Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters. This initiative builds upon successful past partnerships between the two institutions that brought four previous exhibitions to Atlanta: Matisse: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, 1997; Picasso: Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, 1998; Pop Art, 1999; and Van Gogh's Starry Night: Three Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, 2000. This project extends ties between the institutions through professional exchanges, development of educational programs and publications and reciprocal admission benefits. The project also includes innovative programs designed for families, teachers, and diverse audiences of teenagers and 18-35 year-olds, such as a film series drawn from MoMA's archives, Modern Masters of Film: From Edison to Scorsese, including the Andy Warhol-directed The Chelsea Girls.

Fast Forward presents 164 works of art from 105 artists created during the years 1913, 1929, 1950, 1961, and 1988, as well as the art of the present day, and features such iconic works as Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space; Salvador Dali’s 1929 Surrealist painting Illumined Pleasures; Willem de Kooning’s 1950 landmark of Abstract Expressionism, Woman, I; Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 Pop art masterpiece Girl With Ball and Jeff Koons’s famed 1988 porcelain sculpture, Pink Panther.

Fast Forward examines the years prior to the onset of World War I and the Great Depression, the lead-up to postwar American prosperity and the years preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and how artists responded to and were influenced by events on the world stage. The exhibition also presents the works of contemporary artists Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse, and Sarah Sze, whose work extends themes first explored in the twentieth century and updates them for the twenty-first.

The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the museum's size, creating a vibrant "village for the arts" at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta.