ASU Symphony

Imagine this: you’re back in college, you’re navigating and balancing your class schedule, making sure to stay on top of your studies, trying to make good grades, maintaining a social life, maybe even working part time… and on top of that, you’re undergoing intensive orchestral training and professional-level artistic performance.

For students who perform with the ASU Symphony Orchestra, this is often the reality. It’s a student ensemble that performs challenging and diverse repertoire designed to help them emerge as professional musicians, allowing these student musicians to develop a wide range of skills and aptitudes. After all, the ASU Symphony Orchestra is a class.

The group is known for performing canonical works while also pushing musical boundaries with newer works and multi-discplinary collaborations… and we’ll be sampling a little bit of everything on this edition of the program.

We begin with a concert from September 2019, when the ASU Symphony Orchestra performed the first two movements from the Symphony No. 5 by Jean Sibelius. Sibelius began work on his Fifth Symphony at an interesting time in his personal life and also on the global stage. In 1914, Sibelius embarked on a trip to the United States to accept an honorary degree from Yale and for a conducting engagement at Connecticut’s Norfolk Festival. Had it not been for World War 1, he would have continued visiting the United States for such future engagements.

During this visit, though, he began conceptualizing his Fifth Symphony, which he completed by his 50th birthday in 1915. But it was not exactly a rosy project for him to work on… It went through three revisions over four years and was premiered in its final state in 1919, after the end of the war – and upon Finland’s independence from Russia.

Also on the program are 2023 performances of music by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Michael Abels, and the “Five Piece, Op.16” by Arnold Schoenberg from a 2019 performance by the ASU Symphony Orchestra.