2024-25
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Learn About the 2024-25 Season Concerts
Bold and Beautiful
Join us for a bold start to the DuPage Symphony Orchestra’s 71st season, with Alexander Borodin’s joyfully melodious Overture to Prince Igor, as well his captivatingly dramatic Symphony No. 2 in B minor, for which the composer provided hints of an underlying program. Alexander Glazunov’s stirring tone poem, Stenka Razin – one of the few pieces he wrote on a nationalistic subject – plus the world premiere of an award–winning composition by high–school composer Angel Alday, The True Awakening to Greatness, round out this inspiring concert.
The DSO’s second season concert features a panoply of works by Nordic composers: Edvard Grieg’s rarely heard overture In Autumn; Carl Nielsen’s ruminating Saga–Drøm, based on an Icelandic tale; and Niels Gade’s vibrant Michelangelo Overture. Concert Artists Guild International Competition Winner Ariel Horowitz – hailed by The Washington Post as a “sweetly lyrical” violinist with “a song in her heart” – joins the DSO for the second half of the program to perform Jean Sibelius’s hauntingly beautiful and relentlessly virtuosic Violin Concerto in D minor.
Acclaimed violist and well–known string teacher in the western suburbs, Rose Armbrust Griffin, is the featured soloist in the DSO’s February concert, performing the rarely–heard but gloriously tuneful Viola Concerto by Cecil Forsyth. The concert is framed by two compelling masterworks: Johannes Brahms’ Tragic Overture, imbued with powerful melancholy, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, commonly known as Pathétique but more aptly designated as the “Passionate.” This exquisitely poignant symphony was Tchaikovsky’s final work in the genre, premiered just nine days before his death.
A gala celebration of the extraordinary talent and accomplishment of our young musicians in DuPage County, with the 2025 DSO Young Artists Auditions Winner presenting the winning concerto from this year’s competition, plus a joint performance by the DSO and the renowned Young Naperville Singers (Angie Johnson, director) in John Rutter’s exuberant setting of seven American spirituals, Feel the Spirit, with mezzo–soprano soloist Leah Dexter. Modest Mussorgsky’s celebrated Pictures at an Exhibition, in the consummate orchestration by Maurice Ravel, rounds out this very special program.