Enhance your concert experience with a sneak preview — Composers come alive and their passions take center stage when ESO Maestro Lawrence Eckerling takes you on an insider’s tour of the history and highlights behind the music.
Meet our soloist, Steven Banks, at Musical Insights. He and our Maestro Lawrence Eckerling will explore the concert program in depth.
Friday, May 31 at 1:30 pm,
Merion's Crystal Ballroom at
529 Davis St, Evanston.
FREE and open to the public.
Please RSVP to 847-570-7815.
Light refreshments will be served and casual tours of apartments will be available after the program.
Give the gift of music by ordering directly from our website and purchasing a custom gift certificate in any denomination of your choice! Certificates may be redeemed for single ticket or season subscriptions for any of our concerts.
You will receive an electronic gift certificate or we can mail the certificate to you or directly to the recipient.
BREAKING NEWS: We caught up with Santa at his North Pole workshop, preparing for Christmas. But he was happy to take a few minutes out of his busy schedule to talk to us about this year’s Evanston Symphony Holiday Concert.
“Ho, ho, ho. It’s that time of year again, folks. And one of the great pleasures of the holiday season is the Evanston Symphony’s annual Holiday Concert, which will take place at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 12 at Evanston Township High School.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, "Human voice is the organ of the soul." Every ESO holiday concert includes the human voice. Voices lift us up and inspire us, and when many voices come together, it’s one of the most moving things a person can hear.
This holiday concert will once again feature the Evanston Symphony Holiday Gospel Choir and the North Shore Choral Society. The Evanston Symphony Gospel Choir is a hometown favorite, led by Evanston’s own Reverend Kenneth Cherry, and the Northshore Choral Society brings together singers from all around Evanston.
Everyone’s favorite tap-dancing reindeer from the Evanston Dance Ensemble (EDE) return to join the Evanston Symphony Orchestra performing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but that’s not all! It wouldn’t be the holiday season without the Nutcracker, and this year the EDE will be dancing the Overture and Peanut Brittle Brigade (March) from Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker, a jazzy version of the classical holiday favorite.
What better way to ring in the concert and the season than with James M. Stephenson’s Holiday Fanfare Medley, which brings together some of the oldest and most beloved Christmas carols (Il est Né, le Divin Enfant; Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella; We Three Kings; Pat-A-Pan; Come All Ye Shepherds; Good King Wenceslas). These bright renditions full of brass and bells will evoke the magic of the season, yet even these ancient tunes do not reflect the oldest of the holiday traditions.
