SMSO opens its 76th season at the Howard Performing Arts Center with a program spanning nearly 90 years of music:

🧑‍🎓 from a 21-year-old composition student‘s calling-card overture
📜 to a jubilant setting of Hebrew psalms
☀️ to a symphony written in a single glorious summer…

We’ll open with Samuel Barber’s The School for Scandal Overture—written when Barber was still a student at Curtis Institute, and good enough to win him one of American music’s top composition prizes right out of the gate.

Then comes Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, commissioned by an English cathedral at a moment when Bernstein had stepped back from conducting to focus on composing. He set the psalm texts in the original Hebrew and insisted the music stay tuneful and direct, even as the classical world around him was pushing toward atonality—a deliberately unfashionable, joyfully melodic choice that’s made it one of his most beloved concert works.

We’re thrilled to be joined by the Southwest Michigan Chorllennium, led by David Carew, for both the Bernstein and a rare a cappella interlude after intermission.

ONE MORE THING:
October 11 is your last chance to purchase a season subscription! Subscribers save 20% on their bundled tickets and get a discount on additional single tickets all season long—a great way to hear everything SMSO has planned for year 76!