Dive into Orchestra Nova Northwest's remarkable season of concerts, where musical narratives unfold through innovation and tradition. From exploring timeless classics to unveiling new compositions, each event is a tapestry of sound that connects past and present. Experience the profound storytelling through music, where each performance is a journey into themes of transformation, expression, and resilience, featuring works by contemporary composers like Caroline Shaw and Anna Clyne, and classics by Haydn and Tchaikovsky. Join us in this celebration of music's enduring power to inspire and transform.

Concert Chronicles: A Season of Sound and Story

This extraordinary program presents a work of the powerful, contemporary voice of composer Carlos Simon, whose works resonate with history, hope, and heart. Pianist Artina McCain returns to perform George Gershwin’s brilliant Piano Concerto in F, a work that blends classical traditions with the bold rhythms of jazz and pulses with energy, romance, and the unmistakable spirit of the American Jazz Age. The program closes with Peter Boyer’s Ellis Island: Dream of America, a poignant and inspiring tribute to the immigrants who shaped the American story. Innovative in its format, the work brings elements of the theater and multimedia into the concert hall, employing actors and projected historical images from the Ellis Island archives. The spoken texts for the work come from the Ellis Island Oral History Project, an historic collection of interviews with actual immigrants about their experiences emigrating to America. This dynamic work reminds us of the hopes, struggles, and dreams that built a nation.

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ELLIS ISLAND: Dream of America

Patricia Reser Center for the Arts

Mt. Hood Community College

ONN’s signature January special event celebration honoring Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton. Introducing Cognizart young artists and featuring a new flute concerto by Portland composer Giancarlo D’Addona Castro, performed by Adam Eccleston, alongside festive works by Freddy Vilches and others in a vibrant celebration of Pan-American voices.

¡El Espectacular! Concert at the Reser

A program that invites you on a journey through a vibrant musical landscape, blending the bold and contemporary with the timeless and profound. This exciting program presents the Western U.S. premiere of a new composition titled Rainn by Karena Ingram, a rising star in contemporary composition. Her evocative work explores the fluidity of nature and emotion and is presented in collaboration with the League of American Orchestras’ Toulmin Commissions Program. Portland piano virtuoso Maria Garcia performs the dramatic elegance of Lūcija Garūta’s Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor — a hidden gem of the 20th-century repertoire, brimming with intensity, lyricism, and dazzling virtuosity. The program closes with the radiance of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 in G Major, a celebration of nature and folk-inspired melodies, bursting with joy and optimism.

INNER LANDSCAPES: Depths of Expression

ONN launches the season with an exciting and creative program that offers a compelling exploration of musical wit, theatricality, and transformation across time. Portland Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, inspired by the elegant surprises of Haydn’s string quartets, juxtaposes classical refinement with unexpected turns. Anna Clyne’s Sound and Fury, inspired by Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is imbued with visceral energy and literary allusions that echoes both Shakespearean drama and Haydnesque contrast. At the center of the program stands Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 60, Il Distratto, a masterful fusion of humor and invention, originally composed for the stage. Together, these works offer a striking balance of reflection, wit, and intensity and form a rich dialogue between past and present, revealing how composers continue to reinvent the concert experience with imagination and daring.

LINEAGE: Sound and Fury

Orchestra Nova Northwest welcomes international competition winner and President of the Cleveland International Piano Competition Yaron Kohlberg as he performs one of the most challenging and exciting piano concertos in the repertoire, the dazzling Piano Concerto No. 3 of Sergei Prokofiev. The orchestra performs Shostakovich’s mighty, tragic, but ultimately triumphal Symphony No. 10, a musical rebuke of the oppressive regime of Joseph Stalin, written immediately after the death of the Soviet dictator.

TESTIMONY: Prokofiev, Shostakovich & Stalin

Orchestra Nova Northwest launches a new collaboration with the brilliant and dynamic Resonance Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble with a mission that mirrors that of the Orchestra Nova Northwest, who is committed to creating and presenting powerful programs promoting meaningful social change. This program will present an evocative work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw that uses excerpts of American poet Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus and also addresses refugee crises, and a rarely performed work of American composer Margaret Bonds that sets W.E.B. Du Bois’ stirring Credo from his 1920 autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. The combined choruses from Lewis and Clark and Reed Colleges will join the Resonance Ensemble and the ONN for the mighty and majestic Dona nobis pacem of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, a work composed in 1936 and written as a plea for peace between the two world wars.

Resonance Nova

Reynolds High School

What would happen if Rossini’s Figaro, Gounod’s Juliet, and Bizet’s Carmen could all be in the same concert hall at the same time? Well, it would be, in a word, SPECTACULAR!

The Spectacular Concert

Orchestra Nova Northwest presents a fascinating and engaging program featuring a dynamic work by Anna Clyne that draws inspiration and its title from Audre Lorde’s poem A Woman Speaks, J.S. Bach’s exquisite masterpiece Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, and Igor Stravinsky’s iconic neoclassic ballet music for Pulcinella created from, and written in the style of, Baroque master Giovanni Pergolesi. Music Director Steven Byess will deliver insightful and entertaining commentary and insights throughout this delightful program.

Restless

University of Portland

The outstanding pianist Artina McCain joins Orchestra Nova NW in an inaugural concert highlighting the long-overlooked contributions of Black composers and artists to classical music. Music Director, Steven Byess has curated an exquisite program featuring work by Pulitzer Prize winner George Walker, Florence Price — the first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra – and Ghanaian-American composer Fred Onovwerosuoke. Passionate and dynamic, this concert brings into focus an essential thread in the fabric of American music.

Essence American

ONN presents a program that honors the powerful legacy of LGBTQ+ composers whose voices have shaped the classical music canon. Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety, a symphony in name and a piano concerto in spirit, traces a soul’s search for meaning in a fractured world. Inspired by W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer prize-winning poem, the music journeys through introspection, disillusionment, and, ultimately, hope — with the solo piano as its restless, poetic voice. ONN welcomes the return of dazzling piano soloist Sara Davis Buechner in her fourth appearance with ONN. The orchestra is featured in the powerful Symphony No. 5 in E Minor of Piotr Tchaikovsky, a deeply emotional journey that weaves darkness and hope, struggle and triumph. Often interpreted as a reflection of Tchaikovsky’s inner turmoil and longing, the symphony builds to a triumphant finale — a powerful reminder of resilience through art. ONN celebrates these two remarkable composers, acknowledging their courage in living authentically in times when their identities were often marginalized.

Orchestra Nova Northwest

16 - 17 May, 2026

BY NATURE: Resilience and Triumph

14 - 15 Mar, 2026

ELLIS ISLAND: Dream of America

Jan 24, 2026

¡El Espectacular! Concert at the Reser

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