On February’s Moxley Carmichael Masterworks program, the Knoxville Symphony paints a vivid landscape of jagged oceanside cliffs with Dame Ethel Smyth’s picturesque On the Cliffs of Cornwall, and the brilliance of the sea with Debussy’s mystifying and brilliant La Mer. Supported by the League of American Orchestra’s Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program, Sarah Gibson’s latest work, to make this mountain taller, makes its Tennessee premiere. Geneva Lewis makes her KSO debut with Beethoven’s lyrical Violin Concerto.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s influence was far-reaching and ushered in a movement of music that was picked up and further developed by composers like Wagner and Strauss. Beethoven’s one and only Violin Concerto has become an audience and performer favorite, filled with delicate melodies and stunning poignance. This concert opens with a premiere by Los Angeles-based composer Sarah Gibson, which the League of American Orchestras commissioned with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. The concert scampers to an exciting finish with Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, a lively, comic work about the conflict between stern forces of repression and the irrepressible spirit of freedom.

Principal Oboe Mary Lynch VanderKolk leads a program of works that includes a new sonata by Sarah Gibson as well as two other pieces written for VanderKolk as part of Through Her Window, an ongoing commissioning and performance project that brings together some of the most eloquent female-identifying musical voices of our time to expand the canon, share stories and reflect on life in the world today. Inspired by the well-known quote attributed to Claudia Alta Johnson, “Art is a window to the soul,” Through Her Window works to undo the historic silencing of women by raising women’s voices through music.