Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. My name is Ryo Hasegawa. I'm the music director
of the BSO. In these days, I cannot be happier and I cannot be proud to be part of this organization,
because IU football is winning. Everywhere I go to, and I tell them that I'm a part of the Bloomington
Symphony Orchestra, and then they always
you know, oh my gosh, you guys are so strong. You guys are beating the Oregon and then the Michigan.
And I don't know anything about football, but I'm happy, you know. But of course, I'm happy and so honored
to be part of this incredible organization, Bloomington Symphony, get to work with these incredible
musicians. And tonight's concert is about exploring a different sound from various cultures and countries.
And it's a celebration of
music, the power of music to heal the human spirit. And this has been presented with our friend, My
Sister's Closet. So thank you so much for joining, Sandy, and other My Sister's Closet folks. All right,
and next piece, it's going to be a jet plane. You have to probably fasten your seat belt because this
mandolin is a piano concerto whose
that is played by our concerto competition winner, Solar Manly. It's one of a kind. And I hope you will
get to sort of witness the future star of the classical music. But without further ado, let us welcome
Solar Manly.
Good to see you here tonight. First things first, how about another round of applause for our amazing
young soloists? Let's hear it for Solar. Yeah. So for those of you who don't already know me, I am Alexis
Witt, and I am the president of the board for the BSO. So as you can see, I have a friend up here with
me on stage here tonight as well. Hello, friend. Hello, friend.
And I'm Sandy Keller with My Sister's Closet of Monroe County. And we are very, very excited to be here
tonight. Absolutely, yes. So you hopefully have seen in your programs that the theme for our season
this year is between friends. And so we are always, of course, grateful for the friendships that we
have within our community. We are grateful for the friendships that we have with other organizations.
And this year, the season in particular, we get to celebrate that in a big way. So we are really excited
to have My Sister's Closet here with us as part of that celebration. Thank you, Kira. We are here tonight
to be able to show everyone all the commonalities in our organizations.
and the people that we serve, particularly vulnerable populations and their children, and we want to
make sure that they feel like they've got an identity through music, because music makes us whole, music
makes us strong, and it gives us an identity of who we are so that we feel that we can do anything.
Absolutely, yes. Thank you, Sandy.
Thinking a bit more on this nature of friendship, especially new and old friends coming together, I
would like to see just really quickly a show of hands. How many of you is this your very first BSO concert
you've ever been to? Whoa, let's have a round of applause.
That's incredible. Thank you for being here. Welcome to our first time audience members. We hope to
see you many more times. And for everybody else, welcome back. We're always happy to see you. Now,
of course, you probably know that buying your tickets, showing up here to these concerts is one of the
very best ways that you can support our organization. But you might not know that ticket sales make
up for only about a third of our very lean budget.
So if you want to continue to be our friends and to help us be your friends back and having these amazing
events for everybody to come together and enjoy as a community, we hope that you could help us make
up some of the difference. We of course get grants, we of course have sponsors, but donations are really
a big way that we can help make up for the rest of our budget.
So you can look in your programs for more information on how to give to our organization. We also have
a donation box out in the lobby, old fashioned style, and we hope you can help support the BSO in continuing
to do what we're doing. And Sandy, how can we help support My Sister's Closet? You can also go out to
a table out there and pick up some information about our organization and the work that we do in the
community, and of course,
We are in an interesting place where we are trying to keep going past June of this next year because
our lease is ending and we need to renovate a building we need to move into. So if you want information
about that, it's out there. We'd appreciate any of your support or if you'd like to get involved somehow,
we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely. Thank you everyone for your support. Thank you all for being
here. I hope you enjoy the rest of the concert.