Holidays in Sammamish
2024-2025 Concert Two

Sunday, December 8, 2024 | 2PM
Eastlake Performing Arts Center

The Sammamish Symphony presents its distinctive mixture of traditional festive music, favorites from the symphonic repertoire, new holiday discoveries, and some surprises.

"Energy and joyousness": Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21
2024-2025 Concert Three

Sunday, February 23, 2025 | 2PM
Eastlake Performing Arts Center

Long before it was inextricably linked to the film Elvira Madigan, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 was held in the highest regard as one of the most sublime of Mozart's works in the genre. We present this timeless masterpiece in a performance featuring pianist Nina Iorik, who brings her simultaneous youthful exuberance and astonishing maturity to this great work. The program opens with music by Antonio Salieri (who, we emphatically stress, did not murder Mozart), his "Venetian" Symphony in D. English composer Richard Rodney Bennett, well-known for such film scores as Murder on the Orient Express, is represented by his delightful orchestral miniature Journal.

"Singular and original": Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1
2024-2025 Concert Four

Sunday, April 27, 2025 | 2PM
Location to be announced

Even in his earliest works, the irrepressible and uncompromising spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven was already a given. His Piano Concerto No. 1 — performed here by local treasure Geísa Dutra — is a compendium of his music's powerful strength, transcendent lyricism, and boistrous good humor. In a program honoring the Austro-German traditions in music, we begin with Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 91 (in a unique arrangement for wind ensemble) and continue with Paul Hindemith's spirited Five Pieces for String Orchestra.

American Visions
2024-2025 Concert Five

Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 2PM
Eastlake Performing Arts Center

The Sammamish Symphony's season finale offers three major works by three major American composers. Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring is widely considered to be his masterpiece, a celebration of life in a Shaker village. Paul Creston's Partita for Flute, Violin and Strings is a piquant double concerto in the style of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, and features two of our esteemed principals: concertmaster Caroline Faflak and flutist Melissa Underhill. Opening the program is a suite from one of the finest and most beautiful of all film scores, Elmer Bernstein's music for To Kill a Mockingbird.

"My soul trembles with love":
Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes
2024-2025 Concert One

Sunday, October 20, 2024 | 6PM*
Eastlake Performing Arts Center
* note evening concert start time

Long before radios, TV, and video games, the piano was the preferred vehicle for entertainment in the home. Many composers wrote pieces for informal performance by two pianists at one instrument, and the Sammamish Symphony celebrates two gems from the world of four-hand piano music: Franz Schubert's Fantasie in f minor (in an arrangement for wind ensemble) and Johannes Brahms' Liebeslieder-Walzer (Love-Song Waltzes), presented both in their original versions and orchestrally. Violinist Hannah Reitz is the vibrant soloist in a violin concerto by Antonio Vivaldi, and the orchestra plays the U.S. premiere of Australian-British composer Hubert Clifford's evocative Kentish Suite.