Winter Serenade
Sunday, December 13, 2026, at 1:30 PM
William Waag Conducting
Scottish Rite Temple
463 Paseo De Peralta
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Admission is free and donations are appreciated.
Parking available at the venue
Warm music for a cold month: an American serenade built on pure melody, a Russian symphony that ends in sunlight, and one more work to be announced. Come thaw out with us.
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Serenade for Orchestra
William Grant Still
Still was the first Black American to conduct a major American orchestra and the first to have a symphony performed by one, and he spent most of his career in Los Angeles writing for radio, film, and the concert hall. The Serenade, from 1957, is one of his short lyric pieces: one warm, long-breathed melody after another, with the harp threading through the orchestra.
Symphony No. 2 in B minor
Alexander Borodin
This symphony opens with a fist on the table: one dark theme, hammered out by the whole orchestra in unison. The heart of it is the slow movement, where a lone horn sings over the harp like a bard telling an old story. The finale trades all that darkness for pure sunlight. Borodin, a chemist by trade, needed seven years to write it — you'd swear it took one sitting.