Olympia Symphony Orchestra Presents: EMBRACE

About this event

About the Show Some music feels like a hand reaching back. EMBRACE turns Kaleidoscope toward the people beside us: the partners, friends, mentors, and quiet companions who change the way we hear the world. This is a concert about friendship, conversation, memory, and the communities that help us become ourselves. Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Sinfonia Pacifica opens the program with a vibrant sound world shaped by travel and imagination. Though the title points toward the Pacific, the music also reflects the composer’s interest in sounds and colors she was exploring for an opera set in India. The result is a bright, unexpected opening work by one of Australia’s distinctive 20th-century musical voices. At the heart of the concert, Seattle Symphony musicians Helen Kim and Katie Liu join Olympia Symphony for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola. The piece gives both soloists equal voice, not as rivals, but as partners. One phrase reaches out. Another answers. The violin and viola move together, apart, and together again, creating music that feels like trust. Elgar’s Enigma Variations closes the concert with one of the great musical love letters to community. Before Enigma, Elgar was searching for the sound that would define him. The breakthrough came when he turned toward the people closest to him. Encouraged by his wife Alice, Elgar wrote a set of variations inspired by friends, private jokes, personal memories, and the relationships that shaped his life. The mystery of the hidden “enigma” remains unsolved, but the heart of the piece is clear: Elgar found his voice by listening to his own community. From the tenderness of “Nimrod” to the sweep of the finale, Enigma Variations reminds us that no artist creates alone. EMBRACE is a concert about the people we carry with us, and the music that carries them forward. Program Peggy GLANVILLE-HICKS: Sinfonia Pacifica Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART: Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E-Flat…