Audience Choice Concert
YOUR VOTE. YOUR MUSIC.
Help program the opening Masterworks concert of the 2025/26 Season.
The decision-making is in your hands!
Cast your vote for the music you’d like to hear on the
opening Masterworks concert of the 2025/26 Season, scheduled for November 14, 2025
Choose your favorite overture, piano concerto and symphony from a selection of choices in each category below.
Voting open through May 15, 2025. One vote per person.
Results will be unveiled at the 2024/25 season finale, May 30, 2024 and via the WMS website.
All participants may enter a drawing to win one of three prizes:
Coffee with Music Director Scott Speck; pair of tickets for May 30, 2024 season finale; pair of tickets for the Audience Choice Concert Nov 14, 2025.
Listening Links
Scroll through the possible choices in each category, listen to find your favorite!
OVERTURE
Offenbach: Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld
German born Jacques Offenbach was a prolific composer of about 100 French operettas that satirized French society of his time. Orpheus in the Underworld is an irreverent parody of Glucks’ Orfeo ed Euridice. The overture concludes with the risqué Galop Infernal, (you’ll recognize it as the “Can-Can”), which shocked the Parisian audiences of the day!
This overture to the opera William Tell - the last of Rossini's 39 operas - is a major part of the concert and recording repertoire. It's famous finale, "March of The Swiss Soldiers," is particularly familiar from its use in the radio and television shows of "The Lone Ranger." Several portions of the overture were also used prominently in the films "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Eagle Shooting Heroes."
Suppé: Light Cavalry Overture
Light Cavalry Overture is the overture to the operetta Light Cavalry that premiered in Vienna in 1866. Although the operetta is rarely performed, the overture is one of von Suppe's most popular compositions and has achieved a quite distinct life of its own. The main theme of the overture has been quoted numerous times by musicians, cartoons and other media.
Mozart: Overture to The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute was intended to be highly entertaining. Magic was a popular source of entertainment with audiences of the time and its inclusion as a theme of the opera guaranteed the opera’s success. 100 performances took place in the first year, alone! Unfortunately, the success of The Magic Flute came a little late for Mozart. The composer died three months after the premiere in September 1791.
PIANO CONCERTO
Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor
Journey through Norwegian landscapes with Grieg’s timeless piano concerto. The concerto is much more than a vehicle for pianistic virtuosity. It has been described as a “tone poem for piano and orchestra” in which an array of colors and moods unfolds. It has one of the most memorable opening statements in all of music, followed by a nearly constant dialogue between and the piano and the instruments of the orchestra.
Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 2
An infectious lightness of spirit pervades Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, which was composed in 1957 for his son Maxim's 19th birthday. It is music which takes us on a brief, jubilant romp filled with youthful vitality, cheerful and quirky voices, and unabashed humor. The lushly beautiful second movement creates a space of dreamy intimacy and warmth.
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
There are four piano concertos in Rachmaninoff’s body of work. However, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini might be regarded as his unofficial fifth piano concerto. The work is composed of 24 variations of a hauntingly beautiful melody. Its most-famous moment, Variation No. 18, creates pure magic and has been used throughout popular culture including the romantic fantasy film, Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
SYMPHONY
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4
Starting with a ferocious fanfare representing fate, Tchaikovsky pours his soul into his Fourth Symphony, a fearless musical autobiography packed with surging melodies and dazzling colors. You'll be moved by the emotional intensity of Tchaikovsky’s poignant journey from high drama to triumph.
Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" Dvořák wrote this symphony while he lived in the US between 1892 and 1895, teaching composition at a new music school in New York. Dvořák was impressed with American folk music and started to incorporate American sounds into his music (there are even some parts in this symphony which sound like they could be a cowboy strolling through the wild west!)
Sibelius: Symphony No. 2
With its rich, sweeping melodies and dynamic brass chorales, Sibelius’s Second Symphony vividly evokes the beauty of his native Finland. It’s an epic journey replete with majestic sound depicting icy, Nordic landscapes. Arguably the composers most famous work, it is a source of inspiration and pride for the Finnish people.
Brahms: Symphony No. 1
Though he had several works for orchestra behind him when he completed his first symphony, the genius of Brahms's symphonic work was kept quiet for years -- Brahms felt he could never live up to Beethoven’s high stature. When Brahms successfully debuted his radiant Symphony No. 1 in 1876, at age 43, the famed conductor Hans von Bülow declared it to be “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
