Into the Night

MWII February 12 & 13, 2026
Into the Night
By David Amado

Night has always stirred the imagination—its mysteries, its dangers, its dreams. Our second Masterworks concert ventures into that twilight world, where stories come alive, shadows stretch, and music dances on the edge of sleep and storm.

We begin with Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a feverish tone poem of witches and dark rites. Though the original 1867 version was rarely heard in Mussorgsky’s lifetime, his friend and fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov reworked and orchestrated it after Mussorgsky’s death, shaping it into the vivid, infernal scene that has since become iconic. Most famously used in Disney’s Fantasia, the piece is a whirlwind conjuring of the supernatural.

The night takes on a different hue in Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Composed in 1935 as the composer was returning to the Soviet Union after years abroad, it is a deeply lyrical, often melancholic work, blending shadowy elegance with moments of folk-inflected vitality. Unlike the spikier angularity of some of Prokofiev’s earlier works, this concerto speaks in a more direct, human voice—wistful, searching, and at times quietly ecstatic. Rising star Hina Khuong-Huu, winner of the Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition, brings her brilliance and depth to this haunting concerto.

The program closes with music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty. Drawn from one of the composer’s most sumptuous scores, the suite is a parade of fairy-tale tableaux, brimming with elegance, humor, and magic. Its finale—the famous waltz—is matched only in popularity by the equally exquisite Swan Lake waltz, which we offer here as an encore. These dances shimmer—even in the dark—and remind us that night is not just the realm of spirits and shadows, but of dreams and wonder.