Asheville Symphony

The Asheville Symphony is the professional orchestra of western North Carolina, a full-size ensemble drawing players from Asheville, the surrounding mountains and regional universities. Its season mixes a masterworks series of standard repertoire with pops nights, holiday concerts, choral programs with local singers, and smaller chamber performances, so a first-timer can pick anything from a Beethoven symphony to film music. Concerts this season are spread around the city and beyond, including the downtown rock club The Orange Peel, First Baptist Church of Asheville, and the Brevard Music Center about 40 minutes south. Darko Butorac conducts several programs. Dress is relaxed by big-city standards, and the orchestra has a long habit of pairing classical works with local bands and songwriters.

The Asheville Symphony grew out of the city's amateur and community music-making and was established in the 1960s as western North Carolina's professional orchestra. From the start it drew on a regional pool of players, including faculty and graduates of nearby colleges and the summer festival scene in the mountains, and built a subscription series of standard orchestral repertoire for an audience that had few other places to hear a full orchestra live.

For most of its life the orchestra's home has been the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in downtown Asheville, part of the city's civic center complex. Renovation work on that building in recent seasons pushed concerts out into other venues, and the orchestra has performed in churches, at First Baptist Church of Asheville, and at the Brevard Music Center, the summer festival campus south of the city. It has also played repeatedly at The Orange Peel, a downtown music club, most visibly through Asheville Amadeus, a citywide festival, and through Asheville Symphony Sessions, a project pairing orchestra musicians with local rock, folk and hip-hop artists that produced a recorded album.

Daniel Meyer led the orchestra as music director for more than a decade, a period in which the group expanded its outreach and collaborative programming, and Darko Butorac has led the orchestra in recent seasons. Alongside the masterworks concerts, the organization runs education work in area schools and a youth orchestra program, and it remains the region's principal professional orchestra, presenting classical, pops, choral and holiday programs across Asheville and Brevard.