Help us choose the opening piece for our April 25, 2026 concert!
What do you want HSO to play?
The five finalists are listed below. Listen to them and vote for your favorite! Voting will begin on September 6, 2025, and end on November 15, 2025. Every vote matters–last year the winner only won by five votes!
You can listen to the five options for our April 2026 concert. Click here to vote!
Listening Links
Keep scrolling to listen to all of the possible choices!
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Magic Flute Overture
Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture (1791) is a brilliant introduction to his final opera, blending solemnity with playful vitality. The music alternates between grandeur and lightness, mirroring the opera’s mixture of spiritual seriousness and comic fantasy. With its clarity of form, dazzling energy, and symbolic overtones, the overture sets the stage for the opera’s journey from darkness to enlightenment.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
The Sea Hawk: Overture
Korngold was a rising star in Vienna when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s and settled in southern California. He quickly became one of Hollywood’s most important composers. His music for the 1940 film, The Sea Hawk, is full of rich colors and melodies and energy–a fitting addition to the swashbuckling tale of adventure.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Egmont: Overture
Beethoven’s overture, written in 1809-10, also expresses a desire for freedom from oppression. Set in the sixteenth century, under Spanish oppression, Beethoven used this piece to express his opposition to Napoleonic rule. It begins in weighty darkness and tragic melodies before gaining urgency and ending in triumph.
Arturo Márquez
Danzón No. 2
Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2 is one of the most frequently performed Latin American pieces performed today. It is based on the Cuban danzón. Márquez writes, “”Danzón 2 … endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music.”
Franz Schubert
Allegro moderato (I.) from Unfinished Symphony
Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, known as the “Unfinished” (1822), is one of his most beloved works, despite surviving in only two completed movements. The primary theme of the first movement begins in a hushed and mysterious way, unfolding into music of dramatic intensity and lyrical beauty. This work captures Schubert’s gift for melody, orchestral color, and emotional depth, leaving a sense of both wonder and poignancy.