Some dreams are wild. Some are luminous. Some sound like home.

 

DREAM closes Olympia Symphony’s 2026/27 season, Kaleidoscope, with a celebration of the Americas: not as one place, one story, or one sound, but as a vast meeting of landscapes, cultures, memories, and hope.

 

The season began with LIFT, a concert that asked what American music sounds like when many voices rise together. DREAM brings that question full circle, widening the lens from America as a nation to America as a continent.

 

The concert opens with Jimmy López’s América Salvaje, a symphonic poem inspired by Blasón by Peruvian poet José Santos Chocano. The poem celebrates Peru through its Indigenous and Hispanic inheritances, then opens outward into a larger vision of land, ancestry, pride, and identity. López transforms that spirit into orchestral sound: bold, cinematic, and alive with the feeling of a land singing itself into being.

 

At the center of the program, Olympia Symphony’s own Principal Flute Mary Jensen steps into the spotlight for Kevin Puts’ Flute Concerto. Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, the concerto grows from a simple musical idea into something lyrical, searching, and deeply human. Just as Habibi enters into conversation with Beethoven in CONNECT, Puts enters into conversation with Mozart in his Flute Concerto, especially in a second movement inspired by the floating world of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. It is music about influence, memory, and finding your own voice inside something beloved.

 

Then comes Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” the heart of the concert and the final destination of the season. Written while Dvořák was living in America, the symphony became one of the most beloved musical visions of the idea of a new world filled with longing, possibility, and hope. Its famous Largo, with the English horn melody many listeners know by heart, seems to suspend time. Its final movement brings the full orchestra into a sweeping statement of arrival.

 

DREAM closes Kaleidoscope by bringing its many colors into one final vision: wild, luminous, searching, and full of possibility.