We live in an ever more complex and rapidly changing world. Some changes foster excitement and hope, while others bring anxiety and fear. Some divide us, and others give us reason to reach out to and rely on each other.  From the audacious lovers in Bernstein’s West Side Story to the defiant tones of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and the courageous chronicles of Bonds’ Montgomery Variations, the music of MPO’s 32nd season calls us together as change-makers. It offers hope, inspiration, and the courage to imagine a more just, inclusive, creative, and beautiful world.

Fanfare and Fantasy
Saturday, November 9, 2024
7:30pm @ Ted Mann Concert Hall
Leonard Bernstein: Overture to West Side Story (arr. Maurice Peress)
Ulysses Kay: Fantasy Variations
Alice Mary Smith: Symphony in C Minor

To fantasize is to imagine the impossible. In Bernstein’s iconic West Side Story, two lovers reach across the uncrossable boundaries of race and culture. Ulysses Kay conjures variations on a theme that does not yet exist. And Alice Mary Smith breaks through 19th century gender norms to become England’s first female symphonist.

Sunday, March 9, 2025
2:00pm @ O’Shaughnessy Auditorium
Nkeiru Okoye: Voices Shouting Out
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5

In the face of fear and the wake of the unimaginable, music offers the courage to rise up and shout out truths to which words cannot speak. Nkeiru Okoye responds to the events of September 11, 2001 with “a march to acknowledge those fighting on behalf of our safety, and yet a sparkling celebration of life for those of us who continue living.” Shostakovich’s monumental fifth symphony journeys from torment to rebirth under the oppressive watch of the Soviet state.

Reverberations
Saturday, May 24, 2025
7:30pm @ O’Shaughnessy Auditorium
Aaron Copland: El Salon México
Liza Sobel Crane: Liza’s Tenth For Walter [World Premiere]
Margaret Bonds: Montgomery Variations

All music is created in a specific time and place. Aaron Copland’s emergence from a dance hall in 1930s Mexico were the first steps toward his place as an iconic composer of American music. Margaret Bonds’ symphonic variations on the spiritual, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” center on events in which black Alabamians pushed back against the Jim Crow policies of the American South. And a new work by Liza Sobel Crane is premiered right here in the Twin Cities.

2025 Pride Concert
Details TBD – June 2025 – Stay tuned!