Saturday, Sep. 20, 2025, 7 P.M.

Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center, Amherst College​

The ASO launches its 2025-2026 season with classical music referencing social themes still relevant today. This event — Resistance, Resilience & Reconciliation — also celebrates and welcomes the incoming Amherst College class of 2029.

The ASO opens with the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco, about the 586 B.C.E. Babylonian captivity of the Israelites and featuring the immortal chorus "Va, pensiero," in which exiles yearn to return to their homeland; it served as Italy's anthem during its struggle for unification during the Risorgimento..  It next performs "Benediction" from Margaret Bonds' masterful Montgomery Variations, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., and based on the spiritual "I Want Jesus to Walk With Me."

The ASO continues with the Leonore Overture #3, Ludwig van Beethoven's 1806 curtain-raiser for his only opera, Fidelio, in which a woman disguises herself as a male prison guard to rescue her husband from death in a political prison. Next, Amherst College senior Charlie Odulio '26 is trumpet soloist in John Williams' moving With Malice Towards None from the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln, and the concert concludes with Finlandia by Jean Sibelius, a musical protest against censorship and domination by the Russian Empire.

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Program:

Giuseppe Verdi: Overture to the opera Nabucco (1841)

Margaret Bonds: "Benediction" from Montgomery Variations (1964)

Ludwig van Beethoven: Leonore Overture #3 (1805)

John Williams: "With Malice Toward None" from the film Lincoln (2012)

Jean Sibelius: Finlandia (1899)

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