Madison Community Orchestra

media release: Madison College Music is proud to announce two upcoming performances of note. The Madison Municipal Band will give their first concert of the 2025-26 academic year on Friday, October 24 at 7:30pm. The Madison Community Orchestra performs their first concert on Friday, November 7 at 7:30pm. Both performances will take place in Mitby Theater at Madison College’s Truax campus.

Each concert will feature collaborations with prized local artists, accompanied by a variety of repertoire. Both concerts are free and open to the public.

The Madison Municipal Band’s concert on October 24 will feature John Aley, principal trumpet of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and professor emeritus at the UW-Madison. Aley will perform Robert Russell Bennett’s Rose Variations for cornet and band, a hidden gem in the trumpet concerto repertoire. Aley’s performance is not to be missed, as his impeccable technique and world-renowned musical sensibility are rarely heard outside of ensemble settings today.

The second half of the concert will include music sure to delight all audiences: highlights from John Williams’ soundtrack to Jurassic Park. Rounding out the program are works by Iryna Aleksiychuk, Carol Brittin Chambers, and Pierre LaPlante.

The November 7 concert performed by the Madison Community Orchestra (MCO) will feature their own concertmaster, Xinzhe Ning. A  D.M.A. candidate in violin performance at UW–Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, Ning studies with Professor Dawn Wohn and was recently a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. Ning’s talents will shine in a too-often-overlooked violin concerto entitled The Butterfly Lovers, co-composed by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang. The piece, written by He & Chen when they were students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in the late 1950s, is among the most famous Chinese works of orchestral music, drawing inspiration from the ancient Chinese folktale of “The Butterfly Lovers.” The concerto provides myriad opportunities for violinists to display their lyrical and technical prowess, while also demonstrating a beautiful blending of Western-European and traditional Chinese musical idioms.

Another collaboration to be celebrated will follow in the concert’s second half: the Madison College Choral Collective, directed by Caroline Henneberry, will join the MCO to perform Borodin’s Polovetzian Dances. Two miniatures by famed American composer Aaron Copland will fill out the remainder of the program.