Dr. Yuchi Chou

Music Director

“Fierce, with graceful gestures and attention to detail.” - KlasikaPlus.cz

Dr. Yuchi Chou, born in Taiwan, enjoys an international career as a conductor and pianist, as well as being a passionate educator and performer. The 2025-2026 Season is her second season with Seattle Festival Orchestra and her third season with SYSO Junior Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Chou has been the winner of the 2021 International Conductors Competition and Workshop in Atlanta, finalist of the International Erno Lanyi Competition, Ansbacher Fellowship with Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival, Conducting Fellow of Allentown (PA) Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Conducting Fellow and at Peninsula Music Festival and San Francisco Shenson Fellowship. Dr. Chou has performed at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall, San Francisco Davies Symphony Hall, and Cleveland Severance Hall. Dr. Chou has been working with a number of orchestras in the Seattle area, including as assistant conductor to Seattle Collaborative Orchestra and guest conductor of West Seattle Community Orchestra and Philharmonia Northwest. Aside from the orchestral activities, Yuchi also serves as President of the Bellevue Federated Music Club.

Past positions include Guest Conductor of Western Washington University, Assistant Conductor of Peninsula Music Festival, Associate/ Assistant Conductor of Community Women’s Orchestra (Oakland, CA); Coaching Conductor of San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Yuchi concluded her academic journey at Northwestern University after San Francisco Conservatory and Oberlin Conservatory. As a Mercer Island resident, Yuchi loves watching her honeybees buzzing in her backyard beehive.

Board of Directors & Volunteers

Officers
Aaron Coe, President
Ilene Dracott, President Emeritus
Ann Guinee, Treasurer
Albert Huang, Secretary

Directors
John Ochsenreiter
Kevin Tao
Nicole Hessler

Volunteers
Flora Lee, Librarian & Webmaster
Andy Wickell
Cory Maccarrone
Edward Zhang
Elena Marcus
Garett Scholtes
Heather Mansell
Karen Fong
Liam Frye-Mason
Melissa Heidrich
Monica Chen
Thomas Wang

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Night on Bald Mountain

Modest Mussorgsky
arr. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain is a vivid depiction of pure musical mayhem. Inspired by Russian legends of a witches’ sabbath on St. John’s Eve, the piece erupts with furious energy — howling winds in the strings, shrieking woodwinds, and demonic brass fanfares as spirits and demons gather for a midnight revel. Just as the frenzy reaches its height, dawn breaks: church bells toll in the distance, and a calm chorale gently restores peace as the phantoms fade with the morning light.

Mussorgsky wrote the piece in 1867, but it wasn’t performed during his lifetime. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later reworked and orchestrated it into the version we know today — one that retains all of Mussorgsky’s raw power but with a bit more polish and clarity.

The piece found new life in 1940 when Disney used it in Fantasia, pairing Mussorgsky’s music with striking animation of dark spirits swirling around the mountain. That haunting sequence introduced generations of listeners to the wild imagination and theatrical flair of this repertoire staple.

Ballata delle Gnomidi, P. 124

(Dance of the Gnomes)

Ottorino Respighi

Ottorino Respighi’s Ballata delle Gnomidi (Dance of the Gnomes), composed in 1920, offers a vivid departure from the composer’s more familiar Roman panoramas such as Pines of Rome. Based on a poem by Carlo Clausetti, the work depicts a macabre nocturnal ritual among a grotesque race of gnomes. Two female gnomes select a male companion, lure him to their bedchamber, and ultimately kill him. At dawn, his lifeless body is cast from a cliff into the sea, while the gnome horde erupts into a frenzied dance.

Respighi’s orchestration is both dazzling and unsettling, employing shrieking woodwinds, snarling brass, and percussive effects that evoke laughter, rustling, and ritualistic chaos. The harmonic language draws on late Romantic and early modern influences, with echoes of Debussy’s impressionism and Strauss’s theatricality, yet the sound world remains distinctly Respighi’s.

Though the piece was poorly received at its premiere in Rome, it later gained admirers including Toscanini and Reiner, who recognized its boldness and originality. The music unfolds as a tone poem with strong narrative undercurrents, alternating between eerie stillness and explosive grotesquerie.

Ballata delle Gnomidi reveals a darker facet of Respighi’s imagination — one steeped in fantasy, violence, and sonic experimentation. It stands as a testament to the composer’s versatility and his willingness to explore the uncanny and the theatrical beyond the bounds of conventional symphonic storytelling.

Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Hector Berlioz

When Hector Berlioz wrote his Symphonie fantastique in 1830, he was a passionate twenty-something with a flair for drama — and a hopeless crush. The object of his affection was the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had seen performing Shakespeare in Paris. Though they had never met, Berlioz became infatuated, sending her letters that went unanswered. Out of this mix of love, obsession, and despair came one of the most daring works of the Romantic era.

The symphony tells the story of an artist driven to the edge by unrequited love. After taking opium, he dreams a series of increasingly vivid hallucinations. In each movement, a recurring melody — the idée fixe — represents his beloved, appearing in many guises. The journey moves from a graceful ball to a quiet pastoral scene, then spirals into the grotesque: the artist imagines himself executed in the March to the scaffold, and in the finale, the theme of his beloved reappears amid a witches’ sabbath, transformed into a mocking dance tune.

Berlioz’s orchestration was revolutionary for its time — brilliantly colorful, unrestrained, and theatrical. The Symphonie fantastique broke new ground by combining personal narrative with symphonic form, turning one man’s emotional turmoil into an audacious musical drama. Ironically, the music eventually succeeded where his letters failed: years later, Harriet Smithson heard the piece, met Berlioz, and married him. The marriage didn’t last — but the Symphonie fantastique endures as one of the most imaginative and influential works of the 19th century.

The composer himself provided a detailed program of the symphony to be distributed to audiences:

*******

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

I. Daydreams, passions – He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

II. A ball – He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

III. Scene in the countryside – One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their ‘Ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him... One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets... distant sound of thunder... solitude... silence...

IV. March to the scaffold – He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

V. Dream of a witches’ sabbath – He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath... Roars of delight at her arrival... She joins the diabolical orgy... The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.

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Seattle Festival Orchestra
PO Box 15552
Seattle WA 98115-0552