Name: "Yearning"
Start: 2025-10-26T14:00:00-07:00
Location: Town Hall Seattle

Save the date! Mark your calendar NOW!
Sunday, October 26th - 2pm in Town Hall.
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, Joseph Pollard White, Music Director.
Our 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 26th 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.
Our soloist, guitartist 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.
Our 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.
Please join us as we yearn for a brighter future together through music.