The ECSO will tie a red-white-and-green bow around its 2024-25 season with a program of achingly romantic duets from famous Italian operas—La bohème and Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and Il trovatore and La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi—performed by soprano Sarah Joyce Cooper and Mexican-born tenor Jesús Daniel Hernández. The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus will join the orchestra for “Va, pensiero” (“Go, thought, on wings of gold” ) from Verdi’s Nabucco, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, an anthem of Italian unification and, later, of other oppressed peoples.

The orchestra will also play the stirring overtures to Verdi’s La forza del destino and Luisa Miller, the triumphal march from his Aida, and the intermezzo from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.