Enhance your concert experience with a sneak preview — Composers come alive and their passions take center stage when ESO Maestro Lawrence Eckerling takes you on an insider’s tour of the history and highlights behind the music.
Meet our soloist, Christine Lamprea, at Musical Insights. She and our Maestro Lawrence Eckerling will explore the February concert program in depth.
Friday, January 31st at 1:30 pm,
Merion's Emerald Lounge at
529 Davis St, Evanston.
FREE and open to the public.
Please RSVP to 847-570-7815.
Light refreshments will be served and casual tours of apartments will be available after the program.
Give the gift of music by ordering directly from our website and purchasing a custom gift certificate in any denomination of your choice! Certificates may be redeemed for single ticket or season subscriptions for any of our concerts.
You will receive an electronic gift certificate or we can mail the certificate to you or directly to the recipient.
The Evanston Symphony Orchestra has received a generous bequest from the estate of Anne Dow Weinberg. Ms. Weinberg regularly attended our concerts and was a good friend of Rick Greene, one of our longest serving French Horn players. Ms Weinberg is now a member of our KeyNote Society. Membership in the KeyNote Society is a reflection of the highest individual commitment to the future of the Evanston Symphony Orchestra.
The Evanston Symphony Orchestra played a wonderful free concert on May 19 with a finale that included 120 D65 middle school students. Generous donations at the concert and support from local businesses raised nearly $4,500 which will be used by D65 orchestra teachers for instrument rentals and repairs in the coming year.
Retired ESO cellist Ed Bennett died this past March. Ed was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and began cello there, playing in the school orchestra until his father, an electrical engineer for U.S. Steel, was transferred to Gary, Indiana, when Ed was 15. Ed enrolled in Horace Mann High School in Gary, where he continued playing cello in the high school orchestra and also played with the Gary Symphony. His most memorable concert with the latter was on December 7, 1941; only after the conclusion of the concert were they told about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Vince Flood Receives llinois Council of Orchestras Award
Evanston Symphony Orchestra is proud to announce that Vince Flood won the award for Board President of the Year 2018 from the Illinois Council of Orchestras. Vince has been a strong and effective leader, who has taken this vibrant community orchestra to new heights of performance, while also pioneering initiatives to make it a more inclusive organization that truly serves the whole of its community.
Jessie Montgomery, composer, violinist, and educator, was born December 8, 1981, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to artistic parents. Her mother, award-winning playwright Robbie McCauley, wrote traditional and experimental plays addressing race throughout the 1970s and into the 2010s before her death in 2021. Her father, Edward Montgomery, ran a studio for myriad artistic styles and practiced with her every day.
Czech composer Antonin Dvořák was born in 1841 in Nelahozeves (near Prague) in the Austrian Empire. The oldest of 14 children, Antonin’s upbringing in Nelahozeves nurtured his strong Bohemian heritage, which so strongly influenced his music. Dvořák took organ, piano, and violin lessons and at the young age of 14, composed the Forget-Me-Not Polka in C in 1855.
The first saxophone was invented around 1840 in Brussels by Adolphe Sax, whose family was a maker of woodwind instruments. The metal-bodied, single-reed instrument was developed through the rest of the 19th century, primarily in French-speaking regions. Music with sax began to emerge in the 19th century and was used strikingly in important orchestral works in the early 20th. Earlier this season, you’ve heard saxophones at Pick-Staiger in both Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Gershwin’s An American in Paris.
French composer Paul Dukas (1865-1935) is best known for a single orchestral work, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Based on a 1797 poem by Wolfgang von Goethe, the piece was written in 1897 and premiered later that same year in Paris with Dukas himself conducting the performance. The piece was an instant hit.
