Symphonic Adventures

Symphonic Adventures, the symphony’s flagship education program, is a live, interactive concert for elementary school students. This program provides many students their first opportunity to hear classical music. Each 50-minute interactive concert supports the Symphony’s goal to bring orchestral music to children. By introducing students to the orchestra, its conductor, and the elements of music, the symphony aims to inspire a life-long appreciation of music.

Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Oxnard Performing Arts Center, Oxnard

Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Kavli Theater, Bank of America Performing Arts Center, Thousand Oaks

New West Symphony presents 2025 Symphonic Adventures: Carnival of the Animals, an educational and fun orchestral experience for schoolchildren. GRAMMY-winning Music Director Michael Christie will lead a performance of a composition by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Using inventive instrumentation and unusual orchestral colors as well as poetry by a celebrated American writer Ogden Nash, this concert will be a celebration of wit and virtuosity. New West Symphony will be joined on stage by award-winning virtuosos from Vieness Piano Duo and narrator Jim Meskimen.

Learn about how Carnival of the Animals, unpublished with the composer was alive, became one of the most recognizable and beloved works in the history of classical music. Explore our fabulous orchestral strings and rarely used percussion instrument — the piano — x2!

This is an annual concert that has been presented by the New West Symphony for 30 years.

THE PROGRAM

Camile Saint-Saens  |  Carnival of the Animals

Astor Piazzolla  |  Fuga y Misteria
(arr. Ilya Darintsev)

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov  |  Flight of the Bumblebee
(arr. Andrei Pushkarev)

J.S. Bach  |  Badinerie

Bella Kovacs  |  Sholem Aleichem Rov Feidman
(arr. Boris Allakhverdyan)