The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra this past week announced its plans for the 2020-2021 season, and this Saturday (1/25 at 7 pm), A Tempo host Rachel Katz speaks with Music Director Xian Zhang about the orchestra's plans for the season and Beethoven's 250th anniversary.

An opera that has been dubbed "the night of the seven stars” will fill  this week’s Sunday Opera (1/26 3:00 p.m.) with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1836 marathon of an opera, “Les Huguenots.”  Set in France in the tumultuous times around the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre where the French Protestants were set-upon and murdered by the French Catholics, this grandest of all grand operas has a love story at its center focusing on Valantine, a Catholic girl who renounces her faith in order to be with the Protestant man she loves, and her beloved Raoul.  The final frenzy features a mob killing a church full of women and children, and Valantin’s father killing Raoul and his daughter in a finale that is reminiscent of Halavy’s “La Juive.”  

We’re marching into February on this week’s Dress Circle (1/26 7:00 p.m.) with marches from Broadway and Hollywood.  Now, not every march is self-proclaimed as such, so we’ve looked those songs that will hopefully make you want to get up, grab a baton, and strut around the room.  Along with “Seventy-Six Trombones” from “The Music Man,” “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” “Follow the Fold” from “Guys and Dolls,” and “Hey, Look Me Over,” from “Wildcat,” we’ll also be looking to musicals like “Jupiter’s Darling,” “Oliver!”, and “Hello, Dolly!”.  

On Australia Day, it’s an hour of music celebrating the beleaguered continent’s indigenous peoples.  Peter Sculthorpe devoted much of his compositional output to environmental concerns, such as climate change and preservation of wildlands, and demonstrated an overt sympathy for Aboriginal culture.  His String Quartet No.