The Pensacola Symphony Orchestra (PSO) is celebrating a century of making music. Music Director Peter Rubardt recently stopped by our WUWF studios to talk to Sandra Averhart about their 100th anniversary season, which opens Saturday at the Saenger Theatre.
Support Local Stories. Donate Here.
“It’s a very special moment for us,” said Maestro Rubardt in reference to this historic milestone for the PSO. “It gives us a chance to reflect on so many different things. And if we look backwards on this, I often find myself thinking often ‘who were the people 100 years ago that said we need to have a symphony orchestra’ and figured out a way to get that first concert off the ground.”
Reflecting on the very different city Pensacola was 100 years ago, Rubardt says it’s astonishing that the people who lived here would come together back then to form an orchestra. Now, 100 years later, he credits PSO’s longevity to two things. First, he says it’s a tribute to the music.
“We do play a lot of different kinds of music, but we certainly play a lot of orchestra music and just the power of those great pieces that are the legacy of our field just resonates today as much as it ever has,” he said.
Additionally, he points to the many people who value the music and have rallied around the orchestra every year to make it happen.
“You know, every season that we start, we need donations,” he began. “We need to sell tickets. We need volunteers. We need to find the musicians, many of whom drive six or seven hours to come here. So many pieces come together around this event, every time that we play a concert and you walk out on stage in front of this audience and you just realize you’re part of something incredibly special here in Pensacola and it’s just an absolute marvelous thing to be part of it at this special time.”
Emphasizing that no professional orchestra can survive without significant donations from the communities they play for, PSO picked their 100th anniversary milestone to launch an endowment campaign. It’s an ideal opportunity, he says, to talk with supporters about their history and legacy, but also to look to the future.
“What does the next 100 years of the Pensacola Symphony look like?” Rubardt said of the questions PSO is now asking as an organization. “What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? What are the projects that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time? And maybe around a 100th anniversary season we can actually instigate some of those things.”
As for special considerations in selecting programming for this 100th anniversary season, Rubardt says there were some important criteria.
“You want it to be festive. You want it to have gravitas,” he said. “You want to take on certain pieces that aren’t your everyday pieces and to that end, we’ve got some really marvelous programs this season.”
The season will include PSO’s annual programs such as their free outdoor concert at the Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, Music for Families, and Beethoven and Blue Jeans, as well as their “Beyond the Stage” community engagement, including PSO in the Park and their library performances.
In November, their "Classically Connected" concert will feature a performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. The orchestra will ring in 2026 with their New Year’s Eve concert. “Icon: The Voices that Changed Music” will be performed in February. Click here for the full schedule of events in 2025-26.
Rubardt says most of the highlights are stacked near the end of the season, beginning with their March 7 performance.
“We are playing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, which is just a powerful, towering piece of music,” said Rubardt. “It’s glorious and there’s a huge chorus involved and there are brass instruments all around the hall. It’s big, it’s big! It’s big! And because of that, it’s a great piece for an occasion like this.”
Next on the schedule, on March 28, it’s “Symphonic Spectacular,” featuring the return of legendary violinist Gil Shaham.
“He played here about 10 years ago, I think. And that is still a concert, that everybody that was there that night thought it was a high point of the orchestra,” Rubardt said. “And when we started to look for a special guest artist, everybody said why don’t we just bring Gil Shaham back.”
The season will culminate with PSO’s 100th Anniversary Gala Concert, which will feature the new Pensacola Symphony Youth Orchestra directed by Dr. Daniel Stevens.
“The youth orchestra, with Daniel conducting, will be making its Saenger Theatre debut on the final concert of the season in April,” said Rubardt. “And the concert will close out with a program where the youth orchestra and the Pensacola Symphony will play side-by-side on the stage and to give that youth orchestra that extra shot of excitement to be playing side-by-side with the professionals.”
The season officially kicks off with PSO’s opening night concert on Saturday.
“We’re very excited about this program,” Rubardt stated. “It’s a real high-impact program, a pretty splashy program, I have to say. The first half of it is devoted to Russian music and several of the pieces, I sort of think of them honestly as bon-bons. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, for example, is a very famous piece. The Borodin “Polovtsian Dances,” big razzle dazzle piece; fun to play, fun to listen to.”
According to Rubardt, the second half of the concert will include two flashy pieces dedicated to Spanish music and featuring special guest Chaeyoung Park on Piano.
“So the first of those is written by Manuel de Falla, the great Spanish composer,” he said. “It’s called Nights in the Gardens of Spain and it’s a piece for piano soloist and orchestra and it’s just so colorful, so rhythmic, energy; it’s just full of excitement and verve and richness. And following that is a big piece by Maurice Ravel. Rapsodie Espagnole is the name of that and it’s just about as over the top as Ravel ever gets and that’s pretty over the top. So it’s really an exciting way to start the season.”
The opening concert of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra’s 100th anniversary season is Saturday, 7:30 p.m., at the Saenger Theatre. Tickets are also available for a dress rehearsal beginning at 1:30 p.m.
