Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra To Present A MUSICAL MENAGERIE At Newton City Hall's War Memorial Auditorium

Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra presents a concert for the entire family titled A Musical Menagerie on Sunday, January 18 at Newton City Hall's War Memorial Auditorium.  This free concert is made possible with support from the Music Performance Trust Fund, a division of the American Federation of Musicians, Local #9-535. 

Conductor Conner Gray Covington leads this lively program, guiding audiences on a magical journey through a “musical zoo.” The adventure begins with the buzzing energy of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, setting the tone for an afternoon filled with vivid musical storytelling.

In Camille Saint-Saëns's beloved Carnival of the Animals, clucking chickens, lumbering elephants, and braying donkeys make memorable appearances. Additional works by Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven paint scenes of Children at Play, graceful swans, and birds calling to one another along a pastoral brook. The concert concludes with Caroline Shaw's The Mountain That Loved a Bird.

"I'm so thrilled to present A Musical Menagerie with the wonderful musicians of Pro Arte,” said Covington. “I live in Boston but am frequently conducting somewhere else around the country so I'm especially excited to make music close to home.

“Each piece on the program was inspired in some way by animals and nature, and the program was really built around The Mountain That Loved a Bird,” he continued.  “It's a gorgeous work inspired by the children's book of the same name by Alice McLerran.

“It's such a poignant story that I know both kids and adults will love.  In addition to our guest narrator, Carey Goldberg,  reading the book aloud during the performance, we'll feature beautiful, animated artwork that was created by students at Truckee Community College in Reno, NV, when the piece received its premiere performance by the Reno Chamber Orchestra.

Carey Goldberg is a longtime health and science reporter, including at public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe, and has also been Boston bureau chief of The New York Times and Bloomberg News. She co-authored the 2023 book The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond and is a senior fellow at MIT's Work of the Future Initiative. She owes her reading skills to the Newton public schools. 

Described by Yannick Nézet-Séguin as “a musician who lives the music,” American conductor Conner Gray Covington performs a remarkably wide-ranging repertoire spanning symphonic, operatic, and film music. In the 2025–2026 season, he appears with the Boston Pops, Chicago Symphony, Las Vegas Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony, and Phoenix Symphony, and returns to the Utah Symphony, where he developed a close relationship during his four-year tenure as Associate Conductor and Principal Conductor of the Deer Valley Music Festival.