Name: Opening Night 2025
Start: 2025-10-04T19:30:00
Location: The Garde Arts Center, Inc.

Toshiyuki Shimada

Nick Hammel

Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra

Music Director & Conductor Toshiyuki Shimada’s 16th season leading the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra will rousingly begin, as usual, with The Star-Spangled Banner. The three other works on the program all had their premieres—in London, Vienna, and St. Petersburg—with the composer conducting. ECSO Instrumental Competition Winner Nicholas Hammel, a master’s candidate at Yale with degrees from the University of Texas and New England Conservatory, will perform Sir Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B Minor, first performed in 1910. Johannes Brahms’s Haydn Variations, composed in 1873, is also known as the Saint Anthony Variations, since the eight variations are based on a “Chorale St. Antoni” from a piece for winds probably misattributed to Joseph Haydn. Fourteen years later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed his caprice on Spanish themes, Capriccio espagnol, a five-movement suite in which the strings at times imitate guitars. The fourth moment opens with five lively cadenzas, by the trumpets and horns, violin, flute, clarinet, and harp.