Dear Listeners, 

Welcome to a new season of the Greenville Symphony.

There is something uniquely meaningful about the first concert of a season. After months of planning and preparation, we finally return to the thing that matters most: gathering together in one room to create beauty as a community.

We begin this season with Mozart’s Requiem, a work that has held an extraordinary place in our collective imagination for more than two centuries. Its unfinished story is famous, but what continues to move me is not the mystery surrounding its creation; it is the humanity of the music itself.

Mozart gives us grief and fear, but also tenderness, consolation, awe, and moments of astonishing serenity. The Requiem confronts some of the largest questions we face as human beings, yet it does so without providing easy answers. Instead, it creates a space in which we can sit with those questions together. To me, that is one of the great gifts of live music.

When an orchestra, chorus, soloists, stage crew, staff, and audience gather for a work like this, we are doing something increasingly rare. We remove ourselves from the digital world and give our full attention to the same thing at the same time. We breathe together. We listen together. And for a few hours, people with completely different lives, experiences, and perspectives become part of one beautiful shared experience.

That spirit will carry us throughout this season. Over the coming months, we will encounter music of enormous range: works that are joyful, dramatic, intimate, virtuosic, familiar, and unexpected. Each program offers another opportunity to hear something differently, to discover something new, and ultimately to understand ourselves and one another a little better in the process.

I am deeply grateful to our musicians, our staff, our board, our donors, our volunteers, and to all of you who continue to make this incredible orchestra possible. The Greenville Symphony belongs to this community, and every time you join us, you are not just an observer; you are part of what we create together.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of another chapter.

Lee Mills
Music Director
Greenville Symphony Orchestra