A season subscription is the best way to
enjoy live symphony music. 

CLASSIC SERIES

American Kaleidoscope

Saturday, SEPT. 24

7:30PM - Alberta Bair Theater

2801 Third Ave N. 

It has been said that it’s impossible to play George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue exceptionally, unless you love it. If that’s true, the love abounds when Kevin Cole is at the keys. Kevin is America’s foremost Gershwin interpreter and has studied the great American composer his entire career. He performs the Gershwin classic composition for piano during Billings Symphony’s tribute to the American Songbook on Saturday at ABT. 

When Kevin was 7 years old, his parents let him stay up late to watch the movie, “Rhapsody in Blue,” a biography of George Gershwin, which kicked off a love of Gershwin’s music that spans a lifetime. 

Read more from our interview with Kevin Cole >

Tickets and more info > 

Kevin Cole featured on Big Sky Blend

Thanks to our friends at Q2 for this interview with Kevin Cole, where he discusses his love of Gershwin and how surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumor from his brain impacted his hearing, but has not touched the passion and feeling he has when playing. After surgery in 2018, Cole was back on his feet in weeks, but the gradual hearing loss his acoustic neuroma had caused in his right ear could not be reversed.

“It’s really been an epiphany for me about what I do to create music,” said Cole in a 2019 interview with the Daily Press. (The hearing loss) changes how you hear the music, but it doesn’t change the emotional and heartfelt connection to the music. When I play the piano midsection of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ it felt the same. I didn’t hear it the same, but I felt it inside the same.”

More on the Big Sky Blend featuring Kevin >

Montana premier of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite

When Pulitzer Prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon set out to write her first opera, she landed on the book Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, a tragic love story set during the American Civil War. Taking that story from page to stage took 28 months, and Cold Mountain debuted in 2015, performed by the Santa Fe Opera. It won the prestigious International Opera Award for Best World Premiere and has since become a favorite of American opera fans.

Higdon’s most recent work, Cold Mountain Suite, excerpted from the Cold Mountain opera, will debut in Montana (the day after its international debut) during American Kaleidoscope, on Saturday, Sept. 24, at the Alberta Bair Theater.

“I just want audience members to sit back and enjoy my music,” she said. “I hope it makes them feel something, but I don't ever want anyone to feel that they must be knowledgeable about classical music to enjoy mine. If you find yourself patting your foot, wanting to cry, or humming a bit after the concert, then I've done my job.”

 Read more from our interview with Jennifer Higdon >

Buy tickets >

Join us for the dress rehearsal!

Saturday, 10:30AM

Alberta Bair Theater

Doors open at 10AM

Tickets are available in advance at the door.

To make our music accessible to all and to provide options for those yet not comfortable with crowds, ee have opened up Symphony dress rehearsals on Saturdays to the public at a reduced cost. Tickets (priced at $25 plus applicable venue fees), available for purchase through the Alberta Bair Theater box office.