Yearning

Program*
Joseph Pollard White, Music Director,
Samuel Barber – Overture to School for Scandal
Maurice Ravel – Menuet Antique
Toru Takemitsu – To the Edge of Dream | Naeim Rahmani, guitar
Antonin Dvoak – Symphony No. 8

Thalia Symphony’s 2025-26 Season takes as its springboard the words of Emma Lazarus on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Our October 26 concert, Yearning, explores music that expresses longing, aching, striving, and wishing …for home …for a lost love …for a happier past or a brighter future.

Celebrated American composer Samuel Barber’s (1910-1981) Overture to the School for Scandal, inspired by the 1777 play by Richard Sheridan, was written in 1931 and was Barber’s first work for full orchestra. It is brilliantly orchestrated and captures the comic spirit of the play, but with an underlying poignancy.

French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) wrote Menuet Antique in 1895, originally for piano and later orchestrated in 1929. Its delicate, stately motion suggests the courtly elegance of pre-revolutionary France.

Thalia Symphony’s soloist, guitarist Naeim Rahmani, will be performing To the Edge of Dream by Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996). Noted for his creative approach to timbre and tone color, Takemitsu’s To the Edge of Dream, from 1983, contrasts and somehow balances a single guitar against the full orchestra.

Thalia Symphony’s featured work in the second half will be Antonín Dvořák’s (1841-1904) Symphony No. 8. Best known to American audiences as the composer of the symphony From the New World, Dvořák came to fame as a proponent of the folk music of his native Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). In this symphony, written in 1889 when he was admitted to the Prague Academy, he makes particularly extensive use of Czech themes and rhythms to evoke the culture and landscape of his homeland.

*Program subject to change