For our 2025–2026 season, IMAGINE: Your Playlist, we wanted to create ways for the music to live with you before your concert experience begins and long after the final note fades. To celebrate IMAGINE: Stories in Sound, Music Director Henry Cheng has put together a playlist that blends orchestral works with songs you may already know and love. Below, Henry shares more about the inspiration behind his selections. Be sure to check out the full playlist on our Spotify page and let the journey continue wherever you are.
From Maestro Henry Cheng:
When we curated “Stories in Sound”, we wanted it to be more than just a concert. Each piece on the program tells a story—of friendship, of memory, of resilience—and together they form something larger than themselves. To carry that idea beyond the concert hall, I’ve been living with this playlist. It’s a mix of classical works and popular songs that mirror the journey of the program. Different genres, different voices, but one thread of story carried through sound.
The opening track, Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, is a lesson in listening. Its stillness invites us into a deeper kind of attention—the same way the first notes of a concert pull us into a shared silence. From there, Brandi Carlile’s The Story reminds us that music is autobiography. Like the solo violin in George Clinton’s The Rose of Sonora, Carlile’s voice carries a tale that is both deeply personal and instantly relatable.
Johnny Cash’s Hurt is raw confession set to music. Its fragility and honesty resonate with the way music can bear our most vulnerable truths. Then the sweeping energy of Ennio Morricone’s Ecstasy of Gold bursts in—cinematic, boundless, carrying the same kind of horizon we hear in Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Both works open doors to landscapes bigger than any one person’s story.
Where do we find comfort in those landscapes? For me, it’s in Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend. These songs remind us that music itself is a form of companionship, a hand offered when life feels overwhelming. It’s the same spirit we find in the orchestra, where dozens of musicians support and uplift one another in sound.
That sense of reflection continues with BTS’s Epiphany, a modern voice that explores identity and self-acceptance. It sits comfortably alongside Elgar’s Nimrod, one of the most profound meditations on friendship and memory ever written. Both invite us to pause, reflect, and be present with one another.
By the time we reach Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All, the story widens again. This is music about what we pass on—teaching dignity, strength, and love to the next generation. In the same way, we open our doors to every student in our community, believing music should not be a privilege, but a right.
Finally, Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque brings us into a space of light and stillness. It feels like a benediction: fragile, luminous, and communal.
In many ways, this playlist is simply another movement of the concert itself. It extends the experience into your car ride home, into your kitchen, into your quiet evening. Stories in Sound reminds us that music doesn’t just tell a story. It tells our story—across genres, across generations, and across the seasons we share together.