“Music begins where language ends.” Sibelius’s profound words echo deeply through this program steeped in nostalgia and emotional gravitas. Our Masterworks series begins with a defiantly optimistic WWII-era overture by Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz as she lived through the war in Warsaw. Sibelius’s haunting and exquisite Violin Concerto follows, delivering an achingly beautiful tribute to a dream slipping just out of reach. Last is Dvořák’s sun-soaked Eighth Symphony, a nostalgic reflection of summertime bird calls, windswept trees, and happier times.

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MASTERWORKS 1 Echoes

First Baptist Church

This innovative recital project weaves together pieces for solo violin and violin/electronics by J.S. Bach and composers of other eras to form a program with dramatic arc, flow, and scope. Bach’s music is a perfect fusion of technical mastery and innovation, but it’s his ability to transcend technique and access the spiritual and mystical realm that has inspired this program. Alongside existing works by Rafiq Bhatia, Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Nicola Matteis, Kaija Saariaho, and Paul Wiancko, Kenney commissioned two new works for this project by composers Salina Fisher and Angélica Negrón. This project first premiered in the spring of 2023; according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “To every Bach offering, Kenney . . . brought piercing insight and a masterful sense of voicing. Vertically, horizontally, altogether: the music cohered and shone in every direction.”

Violin Recital With Alexi Kenney: Shifting Ground

Join us for our fourth annual Symphony in the Park pops concert, presented by Givens Communities! You’ll hear everything from classical to pop hits to Broadway in this free concert held in downtown Asheville’s Pack Square Park. Featuring works by Rossini, Strauss, Bizet, as well as music from Dune and Superman, alongside Queen and Broadway hits, this concert is perfect for the whole family!

Symphony in the ParK

Pack Square Park

Known for his genre-bending projects with operatic and Broadway productions in addition to the world’s great symphony orchestras, artist and Asheville resident Adam Larsen brings video projection design to ALT ASO for a uniquely immersive performance at Devil’s Foot Beverage Co.’s taproom. Paired with an innovative symphonic program, this performance will be unlike any other, uniting visual art and orchestral sounds for a truly unique experience.

ALT ASO @ The Mule at Devil’s Foot Beverage Co.

Harrah's Cherokee Center - Asheville

Our season finale takes a dramatic turn and features two powerful titans of Western repertoire, both firsts for their composers. Once deemed worthless and unplayable by his mentor, Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto quickly leapt to international fame and secured its place as one of the most bombastic and popular piano concertos ever composed. A fitting companion indeed for Mahler’s mighty “Titan.” Mahler evokes the “voice of nature” with his first symphony, capturing nature’s beauty with “leisurely” melodies and its fury with “stürmisch bewegt” (stormy motion) for a powerful and emotional end to our season.

MASTERWORKS 7 Titan

Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium

Join us for an evening of chamber music featuring members of the Youth Philharmonic who were selected to perform in the Cello Ensemble, String Quartet, Woodwind Quartet, Brass Quartet, and Percussion Ensemble.

ASYO Honors Chamber Ensembles Concert

Asheville High School

Witness future musicians and music lovers in action at our Youth Orchestra’s Spring 2024 concert. The ASYO Spring concert will include performances by the Overture Strings, Divertimento Strings, Sinfonia Strings, Concert Orchestra, Youth Philharmonic, and Percussion Ensemble. They will play works from Bach, Verdi, Kander, Brahms, Zare and much more!

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra Spring Concert

Mars Hill University

From Vienna to old Hollywood, we bring operatic charm and glamour to the stage with a program featuring selections from Mahler and Mozart alongside Strauss’s ostentatious Der Rosenkavalier and a sparkling violin concerto by Korngold, an early Hollywood composer.

Golden Glamour

Part of the new Asheville Symphony Artist Residency, Violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley – who is concertmaster for the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the best orchestras in the world –  will join the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra as concertmaster for their mid-winter concert. The ASYO’s Overture Strings, Sinfonia Strings, Concert Orchestra, Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, and Percussion Ensembles will be featured in this show you won’t want to miss!

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra – Mid-Winter Concert with Noah Bendix-Balgley

First Baptist Church Of Asheville

Noah Bendix-Balgley and Shanshan Yao headline this all-violin, all-concerto program as a husband and wife duo. The program kicks off with the delicate dance between two violins of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. The virtuosic and intertwining melodies continue with the iconic Chinese work for violin and orchestra, Butterfly Lovers. Finally, Bendix-Balgley takes on the grand finale: Brahms’s one and only violin concerto, famed for its technically demanding passages and stunning lyricism.

Violin Virtuosi

Shanshan Yao will lead a hands-on workshop in orchestral technique for strings students of the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra and Buncombe County and Asheville City Schools. This Masterclass is free for participants and we welcome friends and family to attend. If you are a music teacher planning to attend, we’d love to get to know you! Click here for the teacher registration.

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra Masterclass with Shanshan Yao

When asked to name the greatest composer of all time, Beethoven exclaimed without hesitation, “Handel — to him I bow the knee.” Mozart too held the English master in high regard: “Handel understands effect better than any of us… When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.” Experience the full might and awe-inspiring emotional weight of Handel’s legendary Messiah and kick off your holiday festivities with this powerful performance featuring four outstanding soloists and the Asheville Symphony Chorus.

Messiah

Members of the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra will join the Asheville Symphony Orchestra for select pieces, celebrating the amazing talent of our student musicians on this performance!

Cirque de la Symphonie

Join the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra (ASYO) for this season’s Winter Concert! The ASYO’s Overture, Divertimento, Sinfonia, Concert, Youth Philharmonic, and Percussion Ensembles will play.

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra – Winter Concert

Ring in the New Year with an unforgettable ABBA tribute show featuring Direct From Sweden backed by your Asheville Symphony! Grab your shiniest disco boots and let’s take a chance on 2025 the way old friends do. Dance your way into the New Year with hits like “Mamma Mia,” “Waterloo,” “Fernando,” “Dancing Queen,” and more!

NYE: Music of ABBA with Direct From Sweden

Rock out with ALT ASO at The Orange Peel as we bring you a night of electrifying classic rock hits! Featuring the incredible Keri Fuller, known for her roles as Jane Seymour in the Broadway production of Six the Musical and her performances in Jagged Little Pill and Waitress. Don’t miss your chance to experience this program where iconic rock anthems and classical masterpieces collide.

ALT ASO: Classic Rock @ The Orange Peel

Iconic, legendary, epic — the Emperor stands alone as an unrivaled titan among concertos. With his fifth and final piano concerto, Beethoven goes beyond the traditions of his early inspirations and ultimately crafts an innovative and epic masterpiece that surpasses his predecessors’ wildest dreams. Sharing the program with Beethoven is one such early inspiration: C.P.E. Bach. Son of J.S. Bach and a master in his own right, C.P.E. Bach left a huge impact on future generations, including Beethoven. Rounding out the program is Brahms, the man perhaps most preoccupied with Beethoven’s legacy. As Beethoven’s de facto successor, Brahms revered, grappled with, and eventually transcended his idol’s legacy through his magnificent symphonies.

Legacy

Hailed for her “brilliant, sensitive, and imaginative playing with resourcefulness of technique and naturalness of musicality” (New York Times), Martina Filjak stands out as a “premium class pianist” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). This captivating solo piano recital program features two distinctive parts, each showcasing works by piano masters from different eras. The first half explores works by Baroque masters, spotlighting Handel’s Suite No. 7 in G minor and J.S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Shifting gears to the 19th-century Romantics for the second half, Filjak masterfully interprets Schumann’s Carnival Scenes from Vienna, Scriabin’s Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, and Liszt’s Réminiscences de “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

Piano Recital With Martina Filjak

Only a few days into his visit to Italy, Mendelssohn, like many of us fortunate enough to visit Bel Paese, was already smitten: “This is Italy!” he wrote, “…and I am loving it.” He completed his Fourth Symphony shortly after his return home, and the piece — alongside the other Italy-inspired works on the program by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Charpentier — paints a vibrant picture of the country as seen through the eyes of fellow non-Italians, all united in affection for the vivacious Italian culture, food, wine, and spirit.

Ciao Italia

Many 20th-century composers were approached to reinvent Bizet’s Carmen as a ballet, but only Shchedrin accepted the challenge; instead of struggling to outshine the legendary opera, he embraced Bizet’s work and re-formed it into a modern, percussion-centric ballet suite. The suite is written for strings, vibraphone, temple blocks, castanets, tam-tams, and more to bring the beloved melodies of Carmen to life in unexpected ways with daring ingenuity. Paired with the Carmen Suite is Montgomery’s Strum!; drawing on American folk idioms and inspired by the spirit of dance, Strum! begins with a fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration. Rounding out the program is Mozart’s Parisian concerto for the unique and delightful pairing of flute and harp.

MASTERWORKS 5 Carmen

Wanna dance with somebody? Join us at White Horse Black Mountain for an evening of R&B, pop, and soul with the sensational Erica Gabriel. From classical elegance to the music of Whitney Houston and beyond, this concert promises to be a night of powerful vocals and soulful melodies.

ALT ASO: R&B @ White Horse Black Mountain

Artists have always been drawn to the troubling but profound notions of fate, destiny, and inevitability. Verdi’s La forza del destino explores destiny as an irresistible force bringing two lovers together only to wrench them apart through accidental deaths, tragic misunderstandings, and mistaken identities. The Awakening cello concert, composed and performed by Joshua Roman, reflects on a fateful journey from darkness and anger to personal rebirth through the support of others and the affirmation that no one is alone. Our final exploration of inevitability is Tchaikovsky’s relentless Fifth Symphony; suffused with emotional intensity, introspective depth, and undaunted optimism, the work is centered around a single compelling theme, intricately woven through each movement and rumored to be symbolic of the unrelenting call of fate itself.

MASTERWORKS 6 Fate

Defying convention and boundaries, Time For Three (TF3) stands at the busy intersection of classical music, Americana, and singer-songwriter. To experience TF3 live is to hear the various eras, styles, and traditions of Western music fold in on themselves and emerge anew. This Jukebox program, a featured event in this season’s biennial Asheville Amadeus Festival, includes all three members of TF3 and showcases an eclectic mix of original songs, popular covers, and some of the most iconic music ever written. “In person, the members of Time for Three come off as just three dudes in a band,” said NPR. “But with their staggering technique and freewheeling genre-crossing, it’s hard not to be swept up in the force of their contagious energy.”

TF3’s Jukebox with Time for Three

The Orange Peel

Music possesses an almost magical ability to tell stories. It can paint vivid images of far off lands, enchanted forests, fairy tale villages, the timeless battle between good and evil — all without a single spoken word. Step into the enchanted world of German legends, filled with tales of mysterious swan knights, magic bullets, and mischievous tricksters. Then, delve into the otherworldly Contact; inspired by the idea of interstellar communication, this jazzy, bluegrass-infused, and ethereal concerto for trio was collaboratively written with and for Time For Three.

Tall Tales

Join the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra (ASYO) for this season’s Spring Concert, featuring Time for Three! The ASYO’s Overture, Divertimento, Sinfonia, Concert, Youth Philharmonic, and Percussion Ensembles will play.

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra – Spring Concert

Get swept up in the timeless allure of cabaret with jazz singer Cyrille Aimée. This ALT ASO program, which will also be part of Asheville Amadeus: The Art of Storytelling, will seamlessly blend classical masterpieces, timeless French standards, and original compositions by Aimée.

Asheville Symphony

22 - 23 Nov, 2024

Messiah

Dec 5, 2024

Cirque de la Symphonie

Dec 9, 2024

Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra – Winter Concert

Dec 31, 2024

NYE: Music of ABBA with Direct From Sweden

Jan 14, 2025

ALT ASO: Classic Rock @ The Orange Peel

Sep 21, 2024

MASTERWORKS 1 Echoes

Sep 17, 2024

Violin Recital With Alexi Kenney: Shifting Ground

Asheville Symphony