Evanston Symphony Orchestra

Make sure your holiday season starts with the best holiday event in Evanston!

Don’t miss enjoying these favorite Yule festivities with your family and friends … and you can take advantage of our special rates for a package of 2 adult tickets and 3 children's tickets.

Our blockbuster season concludes as it began, with a monumental work inspired by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony includes vocal soloists and full chorus, but adds organ, bells, and a multitude of extra orchestral players, both on-stage and off-stage, to create an overwhelming narrative of death and eventual resurrection. The North Shore Choral Society joins the ESO for the choral finale of the “Resurrection” as well as in a brief motet from Mozart’s final months.

Phenomenal virtuoso Jeffrey Biegel debuts with the ESO in the blockbuster of all piano concertos, the Third Concerto of Rachmaninoff. The 1996 film Shine was built around the struggles of pianist David Helfgott with the mental and pianist challenges posed by this epic concerto. Prokofiev’s concert suite drawn from his 1934 score for the Soviet film Lt. Kije is a long-time favorite, and the program concludes with another concert suite, prepared by composer John Williams from his blockbuster Star Wars.

The year of 1830 was one of revolts across Europe, and the world of music was also affected. The Symphonie fantastique of Hector Berlioz is among the most revolutionary orchestral advances in music history, particularly in its dazzling use of a very large orchestra. And after Frederick Chopin played the solo in the premiere of his First Piano Concerto in Warsaw, he left Poland forever, settling in Paris.

Our blockbuster 71st season opens with three favorite Viennese composers, and with the Evanston Symphony debut of fast-rising star Alexandra Switala in Mozart’s final violin concerto. Schubert began his final symphony a year after ­attending the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th, and this “Great” C Major symphony lives up to its Beethovenian ­inspiration, although without using a chorus and vocal soloists.

Program

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