For its 2024-25 subscription series — all at Greaves Concert Hall at NKU — the KSO continues to offer a variety of great programming at 2012 prices — $35 per single tickets or $150 for all five concerts for the best seats in the house. Tiered-pricing, Flex-paks and live-streaming passes are also available.
Sinister Sonorities
7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 2
Greaves Concert Hall, NKU
To open Season 33 the KSO celebrates the Mexican festival Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Audience/musician face-painting, masks, candles and a large public ofrenda add tothe atmospheric, ominous opuses the KSO will perform in a frightfully fun evening of classics, premieres and Hispanic favorites and culture.
The program opens with Berlioz’s “Dream of the Witches Sabbath” followed by Silvestre Revueltas serpent-inspired Sensemayá. John Corigliano’s opera The Ghost of Versailles (with its Mozart and Rossini quotations) is heard in a Tristate premiere of the Phantasmagoria suite. Claude Bolling’s contemplative “Mexicaine” from his Concerto for Guitar and Jazz Piano Trio, closes the first half, as the audience and orchestra pass candles to create a special ambience before placing their memorial candles at the public ofrenda on the plaza at intermission.
The second half opens with Alberto Ginestera’s diabolical “Toccata Concertata” from his first piano concerto featuring pianist May Phang. Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 follows, with José Moncayo’s Huapango and closing with Danny Elfman’s creepy yet beautiful “Pianos” from Serenada Schizophrana (also a regional premiere). Zequinha de Abreu’s Tico-Tico No Fuba is the slated enthusiastic, rollicking encore.
Merry Christmas, Darling
7:30 p.m. Friday, December 13
7:30 p.m. Saturday, December 14
Greaves Concert Hall, NKU
The KSO presented the 1984 special edition Carpenters Christmas Portrait album live last year as an exclusive yuletide event. This year, vocalist Denise Parroco returns, as KSO arranger Terry LaBolt adds three Carpenters tunes from their 1978 Christmas recording for a 75-minute evening of secular, sacred, traditional, pop and classical music, forever associated with the season. Join Denise, the KSO and choir for a nostalgic, feel-good Christmas songfest exclusively with the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra.
“Back in the U.S.S.R.”
(Not from the Beatles’ White Album)
7:30 p.m. Saturday, January 25
Greaves Concert Hall, NKU
The KSO recalls the seige of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg — Russia’s second largest city), where and when Dmitri Shostakovich’s war-time Symphony No. 7 was premiered. The image of a patron buying a ticket to the premiere, as Axis troops surrounded and bombarded the city for 900 days, is a testament to the arts’ impact and the will of people to persevere and survive. Sergei Prokoviev’s War and Peace Overture fittingly opens the program.
Carmen in Concert
7:30 p.m. Friday, March 28
3 p.m. Sunday, March 30
Greaves Concert Hall, NKU
Since 2000 the KSO has collaborated with UK and CCM’s Opera Theater programs to bring concert grand opera to NKY with complete performances of Tosca, Otello, La Boheme, Rigoletto, Samson and Delilah, Turandot. Teaming up for the first time with NKU’s School of the Arts (SOTA) and its music, theater, dance and prep departments, the KSO and SOTA will bring Georges Bizet’s Carmen to Greaves Concert Hall for two performances with a cast and orchestra of 200. Nationally and internationally acclaimed leads Kirstin Chávez (Carmen), Richard Trey Smagur (Don José), and Morgan Smith (Escamillo) will join the partnership for this semi- staged concert presentation of Carmen in French with projected English supertitles. Plenty of “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” — just no Cher.
Swingin’ the Classics
7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 10
Greaves Concert Hall, NKU
Those of you who frequent the KSO (indoors and out), know that all forms of jazz fit comfortably within the KSO’s wheelhouse. Stumbling upon intriguing jazz orchestrations of Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Dvorak, Gershwin, Holst, Suppe, Verdi, led James Cassidy to assemble an All-Star Big Band to end the 33rd season with a bang. The concert opens with the jazz piano stylings of Eugen Cicero and his take on C.P.E. Bach’s Solfeggio in C minor. Consummate arranger Billy May’s no-holds-barred approach to Hungarian Dance No. 5, Poet and Peasant Overture, Humoresque and others, paired with today’s big band guru Gordon Goodwin’s interpolations of the Two-part Invention in D minor, Symphony No. 40 in G minor and “Rhapsody in Blue”, and Jeremy Levy’s re-imagining of The Planets sets the stage for a veritable “hornucopia” of in your face classics à la jazz to close the KSO’s 33rd campaign.
Tickets for each show are $19-35 to experience great musicians, guest artists and new and innovative programming unique to our region — same prices as 2012-13. For those who need to stay home, the KSO continues live streaming each concert (with multiple cameras) for the price of a single ticket. Subscribers to all five shows get in-person, preferential seating, and access to live streams with a $25 savings. Tickets are available online at kyso.org or by phone at 859-431-6216.
Kentucky Symphony Orchestra