Oneota Valley Community Orchestra presents Season Finale!

The Oneota Valley Community Orchestra (OVCO) will present its Season 11 Finale on Sunday, April 27, 2025, at the Decorah High School Auditorium. OVCO Music Director Matthew Cody will again be on the podium to conduct the orchestra in a program that will conclude with Howard Hanson’s deeply evocative Symphony No. 2. “Romantic.” The concert opens with Overture by African-American composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery. The first half of the performance will also include the great Viennese composer Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn. American composer Howard Hanson was clearly identified with two institutions in the United States: the famed Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he taught on the faculty and the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, where he taught in the summers and where, to this day, his Symphony No. 2 theme still closes every orchestra concert. The work was created in 1930 for Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Film composer John Williams used Hanson’s symphony as a model for his movie E.T., which OVCO just performed in January. The concert is free and open to the public. The orchestra is sponsored by the Marion E. Jerome Foundation and The Depot Outlet. Further support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority. The OVCO website is www.ovcorchestra.org