Musicians of all ages performing great music
2025-2026 Season
Honor Your Elders
Sunday, November 16th, 2025, 3:00pm * Kalamazoo College Light Fine Arts Building, Dalton Theatre
- Maurice Duruflé: Trois Dances
- Paul Dukas: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
- Andy Akiho: “in that space, at that time” from Sculptures
- William Grant Still: Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American”
Music history likes to pay its most serious attention to the mavericks, the revolutionaries who boldly discarded with precedent. But it is equally an artistically important achievement to listen closely to what one has learned and forge it anew. That is the case with the composers on this program, voices committed to respecting the styles, teachers, and inspirations that preceded them. By 1932, Paris was besotted with one new fashionable trend after another, but Maurice Durufle could not let go of the sound of the past. His Three Dances are redolent of the dreamy world of Debussy and the vivaciousness of his teacher Paul Dukas, who in turn is represented by a work that is the ultimate cautionary tale about honoring elders: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on the poem by Goethe and famously retold by Disney using this thrilling music. Contemporary percussionist and composer Andy Akiho’s work pays homage to an older sculptor, Jun Kaneko, whose oversized pieces so stunned the younger musician that he felt compelled to capture just how he felt looking at them “in that space, at that time.” Finally, William Grant Still — despite seeing himself at the vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance and a new future for black folks in the US — wrote his First Symphony infused with the sounds of the Blues, looking back over his shoulder in dedication to “the sons of the soil, who still retain so many of the traits peculiar to their African forebears.”
Divergent Fates
Saturday, March 7th, 2026, 7:30pm * Kalamazoo College Light Fine Arts Building, Dalton Theatre
- Igor Stravinsky: Violin Concerto in D
- Eliot Heaton, soloist
- Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in e minor
On paper, the biographies of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff read almost identically: they were born less than a decade apart in Russia to wealthy, musically-active families; they were worldly, spending much of their early years living abroad in various European capitals and building an international reputation; they permanently left Russia because of the revolution there, which had no place for either of them; and the ravages of war eventually meant they emigrated to the United States, even dining together at their respective homes in Los Angeles. Yet the music they produced could not have been more different: Stravinsky’s thorny, hard-bitten, thrillingly rhythmic language was diametrically opposed to Rachmaninoff’s brooding, arch-Romantic voluptuousness. Here, simply juxtaposed against one another, are two of their greatest works. For the Stravinsky, we are joined by brilliant soloist Eliot Heaton, newly a member of the vaunted Philadelphia Orchestra.
La Boheme
Friday, May 15th, 2026 7:00pm * First Presbyterian Church, downtown Kalamazoo
Sunday, May 17th, 2026, 3:00pm * Fountain Street Church, downtown Grand Rapids
Giacomo Puccini: La Boheme
Semi-staged opera performance in collaboration with the West Michigan Opera Project and the Kalamazoo Children’s Chorus.
It’s just a whisp of a story, really — a chance meeting and a blossoming love, a few meals shared with friends, the enduring tribulations of poverty — but in Puccini’s masterful hands, every moment feels so much larger than life, saturated with pathos and beauty. This is why this tale of love found and lost among young starving artists in 19th-Century Paris endures as one of the most beloved operas of all time, restaged and retold again and again. The Philharmonia is thrilled to once again collaborate with the extraordinary singers of the West Michigan Opera Project to present a semi-staged version of this dramatic work in both Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, and we are equally excited to welcome the Kalamazoo Children’s Chorus to our stage for the first time.
Tickets to our Kalamazoo performances are available at the door, and cost $7 for general admission, $3 for students, and are free for students of Kalamazoo College. Tickets for our Grand Rapids performances are free for all.
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