Description

The opening program of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 season, its 15th under Music Director & Conductor Toshiyuki Shimada, spans two centuries and two continents. After standing for The Star-Spangled Banner—as arranged by none other than Igor Stravinsky—the audience will thrill to the theme from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, more recently, Barbie) from German composer Richard Strauss’s 1896 tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. A trip to the Midwest of the 1930s follows: two movements from the orchestral suite based on Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land. The first half wraps up with more from Strauss: the suite from his 1910 comic opera Der Rosenkavalier. Following intermission, London-trained organist Simon Holt, a 25-year resident of southeastern Connecticut and Director of Salt Marsh Opera (among many other organizations), will be the soloist for a performance of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’s sparkling Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, known as the “Organ Symphony,” dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, who died two months after its 1886 premiere.