26/27 Season Part 1: "BODY" - Reno

Before the season asks its great question, come meet the people who will spend the year answering it. BODY brings the audience close, closer than a symphony concert usually allows. Part concert and part show-and-tell, the evening lets our musicians step forward to introduce their instruments and reveal how the sound is truly made: horsehair drawn across gut, breath split on a sharp edge, a single reed crowing before it sings. Section by section they demonstrate their craft, through a Brandenburg for strings, a lone clarinet suspended in Messiaen, a movement of Ravel, and a wind quintet’s sea-shanties, before winds and strings join for Louise Farrenc’s radiant Nonet, a chamber masterpiece unjustly forgotten for a century and blazing back to life.

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time, third movement
Ravel: String Quartet, second movement
Malcolm Arnold: Three Shanties
Louise Farrenc: Nonet

Hannah von Wiehler
Artistic Director & Principal Conductor

About the Series

What, exactly, makes us human?  

We spend our days with machines that speak, write, and compose, and the oldest question has become urgent again. This season looks for the answer in the one art form that cannot be automated without ceasing to exist. Four themed concerts climb the oldest ladder there is, one rung at a time, from the body, to the elements our world is made of, to the mind, and finally inward, to the soul. Around them stand the traditions that anchor our year, and, new this season, Tahoe's first opera.

This is not a season about artificial intelligence. It is a season about us, and about the ancient conversation on who we are, made newly urgent by the machines we are building.

About TOCCATA

The Tahoe Symphony Orchestra & Chorus brings quality, affordable classical performances to the greater Reno-Tahoe area, featuring approximately 160 local and guest artists each year who showcase their talents in this remarkable mountain setting. TOCCATA is celebrating its 22nd season of vocal symphonic performances in the Reno/Tahoe area, now under the direction of Hannah von Wiehler, Artistic Director & Principal Conductor.