It was a harmonious night at Bovard Auditorium on Sunday night as the Student Symphony Orchestra commenced its Spring 2025 concert, which is its final performance of the 2024-25 school year. The night displayed pieces by, among others, Giuseppe Verdi, Claude Debussy and Antonín Dvořák — illustrious compositions that highlight the grandeur and diversity of the over-100-member orchestra.

SSO serves as USC’s student-run symphony, granting students of all majors the opportunity to participate. With two semester-ending concerts each year, SSO’s commitment to inclusivity provides members with many opportunities for leadership, musical practice and orchestral performance in Bovard Auditorium each semester.

Anusha Madapura, a neuroscience major who served as concertmaster, explained SSO’s appeal. She credits SSO with helping her meet some of her closest friends here at USC.

“It’s amazing … SSO is more about having fun and giving people at USC who wouldn’t have a chance otherwise to play music, to give them a platform to make those musical connections and build friendships and play really good music … We all have such busy schedules, but people still make time every Sunday for three hours to play music,” Madapura said.

With the symphony’s abundant membership, its musicians represent a varied array of interests. Farai Halle, a sophomore game development and interactive media major who plays percussion for SSO, discussed his experience with the orchestra. 

“It’s nice to have a space where not everyone is like dedicating their life to music, but you can get different perspectives on all sorts of different kinds of things and make all sorts of friends,” Halle said.

Starting the night with the composition “Glory” by James Horner, the symphony began small in size, yet lost none of its power. Guest conductor Makenna Harding-Davis led those onstage through the piece’s large percussive crescendos and grand, uplifting opening melody. 

This was followed by Claude Debussy’s “Dances for Harp and Strings,” where concerto competition winner Carter Williams sat front and center, plucking at an imposing gold harp. Her mesmerizing fingerwork, producing intoxicating notes, along with the delicate nature of Debussy’s composition, created a dreamlike immersion.

Later in the night, the orchestra’s Call for Scores competition winner, “In Transit,” in its bouncy, anticipatory sounds of life through travel, brought to mind the opening lines of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” Andrew Strawn, the piece’s composer, used horns to create the sound of traffic and percussion to emulate steam pumping out of pipes.

The theme from “How to Train Your Dragon” (2010), introduced to audible shouts of excitement from the audience, was conducted with the help of a special guest. Shihan Jin, SSO’s music director, emerged with a small doll of Toothless, the central dragon from the film. 

“I know some of you [came] to SSO’s concert for this piece,” he announced before revealing the doll and using it as a baton to lead the orchestra through the film’s soaring central theme.

Bovard Auditorium, in all its size, may even feel too small for such an immense orchestra. Just take note of the sheer amount of bows raised at the end of a section for strings. With its musicians packing the stage, the sound the symphony is able to emit is glorious. One can imagine the group filling Walt Disney Concert Hall or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with ease. 

The night also signified the beginning of a major transition for the symphony, as it plans for new leadership in the fall. Among a turnover in the general board, the orchestra will be losing Jin, its longstanding music director. A Ph.D. student at the University studying health economics, Jin has been a central figure in the orchestra’s navigation through the COVID-19 pandemic and its increased expansion over the past half-decade. 

Jin joined the orchestra in 2020, when SSO was performing exclusively online. While his music director predecessor, Adam Karelin, was instrumental in increasing the orchestra’s membership to be campus-wide, Jin played a large role in helping SSO find its eventual home at Bovard.

“The two main major changes I did,” Jin said, “firstly, I brought this orchestra into the indoor venue, so firstly in Tutor Hall at the RTTC, which was the first indoor venue for us, but which has terrible acoustics. My second concert I tried to bring this orchestra into the Bovard Auditorium. So that’s how this tradition is kept — we’re playing in Bovard which is great for the musicians.”

Jin’s influence is felt all throughout the orchestra. As music director, he brings a desire to push the limits of what’s possible for a student-run symphony at USC, introducing bold, personal pieces for students to perform. 

“Our conductor likes to challenge us,” Madapura said. “We always go to the first rehearsal of the semester and we look at the music and we’re like, ‘How are we supposed to play this?’ And we always somehow manage to pull it off.”

Jin has a more-than-capable successor in Mithrandir Wang, who, in his two conducting spots Sunday night (Strawn’s “In Transit” and Verdi’s “Overture to La Forza del destino”) displayed a focused and empathetic composure at the podium. 

The night’s most electrifying pieces, Dvořák’s No. 9 and Verdi’s “Overture to La Forza del destino,” conducted by Jin and Wang respectively, were triumphant displays of the orchestra’s leadership, present and future.

After a long series of acknowledgements, the night ended with a personal note from Jin, before a performance of Franz von Suppé’s “Poet & Peasant” overture. 

As Jin commenced Suppé’s mellifluous overture, the orchestra unified under his quick, succinct movements. While gesturing toward all of the strings on the left-hand side of the stage, Jin leaned out toward the audience, shooting a glance as if to say, “come with us.”

“I have some deep resonance with [“Poet & Peasant”]. For me, the poet and the peasant represent two sides of the life that I admire: The peasant, which is the grounded, practical view of the world, and the poet, which is the romantic, imaginative dream. Both are necessary,” Jin said.