America has never had one sound.
It sings through anthem and blues, through jazz clubs and concert halls, through stride piano, spirituals, street songs, opera, celebration, and reinvention. LIFT opens Olympia Symphony’s 2026/27 season, Kaleidoscope, with a program where American sound rises from joy, memory, resilience, and hope.
Jessie Montgomery’s Banner asks what an anthem means in a country still becoming itself. Woven from The Star-Spangled Banner, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and other musical echoes, it turns a familiar symbol into something larger, more layered, and alive with many voices.
At the heart of the concert, guest artist Calder Failla joins the orchestra for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, where smoky jazz, sweeping melody, and symphonic ambition meet in one of the most recognizable openings in American music. Gershwin returns in Porgy and Bess: Catfish Row, bringing the opera’s Charleston sound world into rich orchestral color. Gershwin’s insistence on an all-Black cast for Porgy and Bess…
