On January 30, 1997, Lukas Foss guest conducted the Mannes Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center in a riveting performance of contemporary and Romantic works. A longstanding advocate of living composers, Mr. Foss included two New York premieres, Jacob Druckman's Seraphic Games and Joan Tower's Duets, and his own Night Music for John Lennon. He concluded the program with a passionate performance of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32.

As a conductor, Mr. Foss has led all of the major orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Leningrad Symphony, and London Symphony. For his work as a composer, Aaron Copland called Foss's body of well over one hundred works "among the most original and stimulating compositions in American music." Embracing his role as a major contemporary composer, Mr. Foss has influenced generations of musicians as composer-in-residence at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tanglewood. The recipient of numerous awards including ten honorary doctorates, a Guggenheim Fellowship and Fulbright Fellowship, he has studied with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Fritz Reiner, Serge Koussevitzky, Hindemith, and Vengerova.