A blockbuster concert, Art of the Score: The Music of John Williams, will be a flagship event in the Canberra Symphony Orchestra’s 2025 season.

With theme songs from Star Wars, Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, it’s part of CSO artistic director and chief conductor Jessica Cottis’s plan to mark the orchestra’s 75th anniversary by telling musical stories.

In fact, the 2025 season theme is “ Stories,” to be explored through music across different cultures and eras.

Audiences can expect myths, legends, folk songs, sacred lore and even children’s folklore, to be seen in Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (My Mother Goose).

Among the world premieres are a commission by Canberra first nations composer Christopher Sainsbury, commemorating a lost song from his Dharug language, while Peggy Polias looks to Ancient Greek mythology and the ruins of Pompeii and Canberra composer and pianist Sally Whitwell will conjure up ghostly stories from the capital region.

If Art of the Score is a blockbuster then The season’s showpiece, Gustav Holst’s The Planets, must be a mega-buster, with over 70 performers playing the famous seven-movement orchestral suite in which each movement is dedicated to a specific planet.

Cottis herself will conduct two Llewellyn Series concerts— Night and Now, featuring Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony and of course, The Planets.

Guest conductors Erin Helyard and Carlo Antonioli will also take up the baton, while guest artists also include composers Elena Kats-Chernin and Peggy Polias, violinist Sophie Rowell, and Canberra flautist Sally Walker.

Joining the CSO chorus for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. soprano Sara Macliver, mezzo soprano Ashlyn Tymms, tenor Louis Hurley, and bass baritone Christopher Richardson.

For the first time, the CSO’s Explore the Orchestra program is included in the season program, allowing children aged up to nine years to enjoy a live concert and try out musical instruments.

There will be four Llewellyn Series concerts featuring large-scale orchestral works, two Australian Series concerts showcasing new Australian music and four Chamber Classics concerts.

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