Holy Acoustics! Inside Community Church of Vero Beach's Music and Fine Arts Program

The place to be this Sunday at 3pm is the Sanctuary at Community Church of Vero Beach, where the Music and Fine Arts program hosts the Space Coast Symphony for Landscapes & Legends.

The sanctuary’s world-class acoustics have long attracted global music royalty. Its stage has welcomed both the Moscow and Royal Philharmonics, alongside legendary soloists Joshua Bell and Marc-André Hamelin. Following suit, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center transferred its entire 2027 season here in Vero Beach after completely selling out its 2026 performances.

Storyboards of The Sorcerer's Apprentice from Disney's Fantasia on Display

And Sunday's program is packed with rich stories.

Start with The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Everyone knows it, whether they realize it or not, as the Mickey Mouse segment from Fantasia, brooms marching and water rising out of control. What most people don't know is that legendary composer Paul Dukas hated his own work so much he destroyed the vast majority of it before he died. This piece survived because it was already too famous to burn.

Then there's Cloud Slant, making its Vero Beach premiere, by composer Kenneth Fuchs, who teaches at UConn and has picked up multiple Grammy nominations over his career, including a win for Best Classical Compendium.

And the closer, Pines of Rome, might be the strangest trick in the whole classical repertoire. In the third movement, Respighi does something nobody had ever done in an orchestral score before: he has the orchestra go silent and plays an actual recording of a nightingale over a gramophone, mid-performance. It was the first time recorded sound was ever used inside a live classical piece, over a century ago, and it still catches audiences off guard today. The finale answers with a slow-building crescendo, meant to feel like a Roman army marching straight at you, one of the great endings in the orchestral repertoire.

That's before you even get to Dr. Jacob Craig, the Vero Beach pianist half the county already knows from local choirs, taking the piano bench for MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2.

Tickets start at $20 at SpaceCoastSymphony.org or (855) 252-7276. Free for 18 and under and college ID holders.