The program opening the Santa Maria Philharmonic’s 2021-2022 season features a Brahms overture celebrating academia and the human striving for and thirst for knowledge, pun-intended, as multiple German collegiate drinking songs are incorporated into the musical celebration. Beethoven's much-beloved Emperor Concerto featuring pianist and returning Santa Maria Philharmonic favorite/soloist, Robert Thies, was composed amidst Napoleon's bombardment of the composer's hometown of Vienna and at a point in the composer's life during which he was afflicted with complete deafness. It is a work with which the word “heroism” is oft associated and one in which tenderness, incomparable beauty, and grandeur are all on full display in, seemingly, a traversing of the whole spectrum of human expression. Ives' Variations on America explores 'My Country 'Tis of Thee' which, itself as a hymn, explores both freedom and liberty.
