This February was full of fun for the Richmond Symphony School of Music! A couple of weeks after the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra’s Side-by-Side with the Richmond Symphony at the start of the month, nearly forty different school groups filled the Carpenter Theatre for our Hopkins-Eggleston Discovery Concerts: Carnival of the Animals. Students from all over Virginia joined us for their concert—some from as far away as Charlotte County and the City of Alexandria!
Later that weekend, we presented the same repertoire as a Family Concert for an audience of nearly one thousand, which featured a pre-concert event with guests from the Children’s Museum of Richmond, Maymont, the Richmond SPCA, the Richmond Performing Arts Alliance, Jan Hampton Violins, and KBI Music Shoppe. Additionally, two of our Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra Honors Chamber Ensembles performed works by Dvořák and Beethoven as guests entered the lobby.
Finally, this week, the students in our 6th annual Future Music Educators Symposium presented their final projects of the year in a special end-of-symposium showcase. The students participating in this year’s symposium include high school juniors and seniors from across the state of Virginia. The 2026 symposium was led by Dr. Sandy Goldie, Department Chair and Director of Music Education at VCUarts Music.
