Evanston Symphony Orchestra

The ESO opens its 78th season with a highly varied program and the return of violin soloist Maya Anjali Buchanan. Buchanan, who wowed the ESO audience two years ago in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, will play Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a piece that reworks several themes from Korngold’s well-known film scores into a soaring composition. The program also includes Jessie Montgomery’s penetrating and stirring Soul Force, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Overture to King Stephen and is anchored by Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.”

The ESO’s 77th anniversary season opens with two of the symphonic canon’s greatest works. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, the “Jupiter,” was his final symphony, and the pinnacle of his symphonic output. A synthesis between classical and baroque eras, it is considered one of the supreme achievements of the Viennese Classical Period. Johannes Brahms’s passionate Symphony No. 2 journeys from complete serenity and melancholy to culminate in triumphal joy.

Florence Price was the first African-American woman to compose a symphony which achieved a live performance. The Evanston Symphony is proud to include her orchestral masterpiece, the tuneful Third Symphony, on the opening concert of our series spotlighting women artists. An Evanston favorite, Ukrainian-American pianist Inna Faliks shares this spotlight in the virtuoso solo part of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The concert opens with the orchestral suite from Leonard Bernstein’s ground-breaking and ever popular West Side Story.

Our 75th anniversary season reopens with a program of masterpieces from the Austro-German tradition. Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner were the two leading composers in the Germanic music world of the mid-to late-19th century: the program begins with one of Wagner’s greatest overtures and concludes with the monumental final symphony of Brahms. Another masterpiece occupies the central part of the concert: the ever-popular Mendelssohn violin concerto with the dazzling virtuoso Arnaud Sussmann.

Our 75th anniversary season opens with a program that pairs Mozart’s last and greatest symphony with Tchaikovsky’s first and greatest piano concerto, an appropriate combination because Tchaikovsky believed that Mozart was the greatest of all composers. Armenian born Kariné Poghosyan debuts with the ESO in this most popular of concertos. Transcend commemorates the 150th anniversary of the completion in 1869 of the transcontinental railroad and honors the Chinese and Irish immigrants who suffered during its construction.

Our 74th season opens with a program combining Nordic masterpieces with the talents of Mindy Kaufman, Solo Piccolo and Flute of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, who will solo in both Vivaldi’s best known piccolo concerto and Carl Nielsen’s Flute Concerto. Two masterpieces by Finland’s Jan Sibelius will open and close the concert: Finlandia and the passionate First Symphony.

Program

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