Maestro Carlson will take the orchestra on an historical journey through 800 years of Russian history...and Russian power in both its splendor and its utter depravity. 

During the first half of the program, the orchestra will perform three works by 19th century composers, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and Tchaikovsky that relate to specific moments in Russia's tsarist past. 

The second half of the program will feature the monumental Tenth Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich, a work composed around the time of Stalin's death in 1953, and which, according to Maestro Carlson, dramatically reflects the composer's "ringing liberation from nearly two decades of Stalin's reign of terror over the Soviet people and its artists."