Auburn Symphony Orchestra: Symphonic Stories

Some forces are invisible, but you feel their pull.

Symphonic Stories brings together three works about distance, memory, imagination, and the stories that hold us together. A voice reaches across grief. A soloist moves through shifting celestial worlds. A woman tells story after story, surviving one night at a time.

Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral begins the journey in a place of remembrance. Written after the death of her brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, the piece imagines a vast sacred space filled with light, crystal, and upward motion. The flute, Higdon’s instrument, and the clarinet, her brother’s instrument, move through the music like two voices reaching toward one another. It is a work of loss, but also of release: a quiet ascent through memory toward something larger.

From there, Auburn Symphony looks outward with the Co-Commission of Gravity at a Distance, a new saxophone concerto by Viet Cuong written for Timothy McAllister. The concerto takes inspiration from celestial bodies and the unseen forces that bind them across immense distances. The solo saxophone moves through orchestral worlds that feel luminous, floating, dense, and immense, tracing a path between isolation and attraction, stillness and motion.

Then comes one of music’s great storytellers. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade draws from One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade survives a violent ruler not through force, but through intelligence, wit, and imagination. Each night, she tells a story compelling enough to earn another dawn. In the orchestra, her voice returns through the solo violin: persuasive, resilient, and unbroken.

With blue cathedral, Gravity at a Distance, and Scheherazade, Symphonic Stories becomes a concert about what connects us across silence, space, and danger. These are stories of remembrance, invention, and survival, told in the language of the orchestra.