Concerts

The West Coast Symphony Orchestra is thrilled to invite you to join us in our 2023-2024 Concert Season! With wonderful soloists, inspiring conductors, and an incredible offering of repertoire, we are sure that you will enjoy attending our concerts this season as much as we will enjoy preparing them for you.

Our season premiere concert in October is titled “Romantic Escape”, and it will indeed transport you out of your weekly routine into a world of lush, beautiful melodies and rich sound. We will be presenting an Overture by Wagner from the opera Lohengrin, Rachmaninoff’s soaringly beautiful and exciting Symphony No. 2, and Brian Feng Li will perform with us Saint-Saens’ stunning Piano Concerto No. 2.

In November, the journey we invite you on is to Northern Europe for our “Nordic Encounters” concert. Featuring music from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, we hope to bring you the bright energy, skilled storytelling, and earthy rhythm and melody from these countries. Alongside music from Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius, we are also proud to present Emmy Lindstrom’s Clarinet Concerto played by Felix Rowe, last year’s winner of the Jim Defina Scholarship.

December’s concert will of course be a festive affair, offering such favourites as selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride as well as a singalong with special guests from the Vancouver Bach Choir. But there will also be some fun twists in this concert . . . as we tick-tock our way toward the holidays, you’ll also hear Leroy Anderson’s fun pieces “Syncopated Clock” and “Typewriter”.

In our first concert of 2024, we will take you South of the border to present music from America the Grand! From the joyfully celebratory Holiday Overture by Elliot Carter to the spaciousness and grandeur of Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, we can’t wait to take you on this trip with us. Also travelling with us will be the wonderful violinist Ken Lin, who will knock your socks off with Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto.

In April, we are excited to play a concert with music spanning two centuries. We will be opening the program with a playful and quirky piece, “Absent-minded Waltz”, by Vancouver composer Gabriella Yorke. From this present-day delight, we go back to the Romantic period to give you two incredible and iconic pieces. Joseph Elworthy will join us for Schumann’s Cello Concerto and we round out the concert with the emotional and beautiful Fourth Symphony by Johannes Brahms.

For our Season Finale concert in June, we are thrilled to finally be able to play for you a concert that was planned for 2020! Guest conductor Brynly Clarke leads us through the Perfect Fool Ballet Music by Gustav Holst to open the concert with a bang. From there, soprano Eve-Lyn de la Haye will enrapture us with the gorgeous folk songs of Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, and we finish the concert with Dvorak’s Symphony from the New World.

We can’t wait to take you with us on all our musical adventures and journeys this season. Please come along for the ride – we promise to sweep you away and then bring you back safe at the end of each evening.