2024-2025 | Concert Season 33

  • "My soul trembles with love":
    Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes
    2024-2025 Concert One

    Sunday, October 20, 2024 | 6PM*
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center
    * note evening concert start time

    Long before radios, TV, and video games, the piano was the preferred vehicle for entertainment in the home. Many composers wrote pieces for informal performance by two pianists at one instrument, and the Sammamish Symphony celebrates two gems from the world of four-hand piano music: Franz Schubert's Fantasie in f minor (in an arrangement for wind ensemble) and Johannes Brahms' Liebeslieder-Walzer (Love-Song Waltzes), presented both in their original versions and orchestrally. Violinist Hannah Reitz is the vibrant soloist in a violin concerto by Antonio Vivaldi, and the orchestra plays the U.S. premiere of Australian-British composer Hubert Clifford's evocative Kentish Suite.

    Tickets

  • Holidays in Sammamish
    2024-2025 Concert Two

    Sunday, December 8, 2024 | 2PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    The Sammamish Symphony presents its distinctive mixture of traditional festive music, favorites from the symphonic repertoire, new holiday discoveries, and some surprises.

    Tickets

  • "Energy and joyousness": Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21
    2024-2025 Concert Three

    Sunday, February 23, 2025 | 2PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    Long before it was inextricably linked to the film Elvira Madigan, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 was held in the highest regard as one of the most sublime of Mozart's works in the genre. We present this timeless masterpiece in a performance featuring pianist Nina Iorik, who brings her simultaneous youthful exuberance and astonishing maturity to this great work. The program opens with music by Antonio Salieri (who, we emphatically stress, did not murder Mozart), his "Venetian" Symphony in D. English composer Richard Rodney Bennett, well-known for such film scores as Murder on the Orient Express, is represented by his delightful orchestral miniature Journal.

    Tickets

  • "Singular and original": Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1
    2024-2025 Concert Four

    Sunday, April 27, 2025 | 2PM
    Location to be announced

    Even in his earliest works, the irrepressible and uncompromising spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven was already a given. His Piano Concerto No. 1 — performed here by local treasure Geísa Dutra — is a compendium of his music's powerful strength, transcendent lyricism, and boistrous good humor. In a program honoring the Austro-German traditions in music, we begin with Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 91 (in a unique arrangement for wind ensemble) and continue with Paul Hindemith's spirited Five Pieces for String Orchestra.

    Tickets

  • American Visions
    2024-2025 Concert Five

    Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 2PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    The Sammamish Symphony's season finale offers three major works by three major American composers. Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring is widely considered to be his masterpiece, a celebration of life in a Shaker village. Paul Creston's Partita for Flute, Violin and Strings is a piquant double concerto in the style of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, and features two of our esteemed principals: concertmaster Caroline Faflak and flutist Melissa Underhill. Opening the program is a suite from one of the finest and most beautiful of all film scores, Elmer Bernstein's music for To Kill a Mockingbird.

    Tickets

Concerts from Prior Seasons

2023-2024 | Concert Season 32

  • A Sammamish Family Concert

    Saturday, October 21, 2023
    2:00PM
    Sammamish Hills Lutheran Church

  • Holidays in Sammamish

    Sunday, December 3, 2023
    2:00PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

  • Humor: Mankind's Greatest Gift

    2023-2024 Season Concert Three

    Sunday, February 25, 2024
    2:00PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    The Sammamish Symphony takes a delightful look at musical humor as exemplified by some major creative figures.

    Joseph Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony (No. 94) is a longtime audience favorite due to its famous rude awakening to those who nodded off during his slow movements.

    Gioachino Rossini, whose operatic output contains some of the medium's funniest scores and librettos, is represented by the overture to Il Signor Bruschino, which contains some unexpected percussive effects from the orchestra's string section.

    Peter Schickele, the mastermind behind the works of P. D. Q. Bach, is the party responsible for Quodlibet, a mélange of themes gleefully stolen from everything from Beethoven symphonies to "Tea for Two."

    Our special guest artist, soprano Stacey Mastrian, will present a bouquet of humorous songs spanning several centuries, with a few surprises thrown in for good measure.

  • Unique Sounds

    2023-2024 Season Concert Four

    Sunday, April 28, 2024
    2:00PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    In a distinct departure from the usual sounds of a symphony concert, the Sammamish Symphony presents four composers whose quests for new sonorities led them down unique and appealing paths.

    Darius Milhaud was the first European composer to compose a masterpiece, The Creation of the World, blending classical forms with American jazz. Heinrich von Biber's Battalia is an unbelievably forward-looking work from 1673 which uses a variety of surprising techniques to describe a group of soldiers preparing for battle.

    Giovanni Gabrieli's fascinating and opulent Renaissance works for multiple brass choirs still speak to audiences centuries later. Our guest soloist Jack Reed will afford a rare opportunity to hear a solo percussionist: Emmanuel Séjourné's Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra

  • "This Blessed Plot, This Earth, This Realm, This England"

    2023-2024 Season Concert Five

    Sunday, June 9, 2024
    2:00PM
    Eastlake Performing Arts Center

    Music Director Adam Stern, self-described as "an unashamed Anglophile", has programmed a season finale indulging his great love for English music.

    The rollicking overture to Aristophanes' The Wasps by Ralph Vaughan Williams will cap a program that includes music by Vaughan Williams' best friend Gustav Holst (of Planets fame), the Impressionist Frederick Delius, the composer-pianist John McCabe (represented here by music from his opera based on C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), and the budding talent George Butterworth, whose career was tragically cut short when he perished in the final days of World War I.

    These diverse voices will paint a picture of England in all its powerful and poetic glory.

2022-2023 Concert Season 31

In a program of considerable variety, the Sammamish Symphony opens its 2022-23 season with music from three different centuries and five different countries. Joseph Haydn's Overture to an English Opera kicks off a concert combining music for the stage, the screen, and the concert-hall. Guitarist Michael Partington is the soloist in Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Guitar Concerto No. 1, a work written for the legendary Andrés Segovia. We also celebrate the 150th anniversary of the great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams with a performance of his Two Hymn-Tune Preludes. Rarities by Morton Gould and Emil Hartmann round out this gala season opener.

The Sammamish Symphony continues its tradition of festive holiday programs with a blend of music for the season, beloved classical bonbons, and some jolly surprises. Come and celebrate the joys of the season by giving yourself the gift of live music!

IEver since its 1928 premiere, Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera has been one of the most oft-performed works of 20th century musical theater. We present an instrumental suite from this timeless masterpiece, which includes its most famous song, Mack the Knife. The concert is rounded out by music of the Italian Baroque (Locatelli), the early Romantic period (Schubert), and the music of old Vienna (Josef Strauss). The concert concludes with two effervescent and lighthearted suites by Igor Stravinsky.

The first of the Three B's, and a perpetual nominee for Greatest Composer of All Time, Johann Sebastian Bach continues to inspire musicians and audiences with the power, the beauty, and the sheer technical brilliance of his music. Join us as we present a wide-ranging concert of Bach's works in several forms. The Sammamish Symphony's principal flute, Melissa Underhill, will be featured in a performance of Bach's Sonata in E minor in a new transcription for flute and orchestra.

The Sammamish Symphony ends its 2022-23 season with a program comprised of works by the three greatest composers of the Classical period. Mozart's overture to his early opera Lucio Silla, essentially a mini-symphony, provides the introduction to Beethoven's vivacious Piano Concerto No. 2 with guest soloist Laure Struber. The concert concludes with one of Haydn's magnificent late symphonies, No. 90 in C Major.