Grammy Award-winner James Ehnes opens the season alongside Courtney Lewis and the Symphony with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, a Romantic masterpiece full of dazzling vivacity and tender melodies perfectly suited to Ehnes’ seemingly boundless facility. The program opens with Jacksonville Symphony violinist Piotr Szewczyk’s River City Fanfare, and concludes with a piece that needs no introduction, Beethoven’s fateful Fifth Symphony.

A feast for fans of the Classical Era, this program maps the style’s course from the late Eighteenth Century to the early Twentieth. Idomeneo represents a watershed moment in Mozart’s opera canon, a genre that would become one of the most defining in his brilliant career. Beethoven’s Eighth may be the most stylistically Classical of his nine symphonies, reminding us that one can listen to the past while saying something of the present. In his Classical Symphony, Prokofiev imagines the sounds Haydn may have created had he been alive in 1917. 

A celebration of Britain’s most legendary songwriters – Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney. Music of the Knights honors their lasting musical influence with songs like “Memory,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Circle of Life,” “Don’t Let the Sun go Down on Me,” “Hey Jude” and many more!

Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C exudes the tremendous upheaval he experienced during its composition: losing much of his family, recovering himself from tuberculosis, and emigrating from France to the United States at the onset of World War II.