Symphony d'Oro Rancho Cordova

Symphony d'Oro Rancho Cordova offers 4 to 5 classical or pops concerts each year (most are free) to Rancho Cordova and surrounding communities. The Symphony also sponsors local soloists and composers, as well as chamber ensembles featuring symphony members who perform at community events.

The Symphony's inaugural concert in 2013 at the Rancho Cordova City Hall showed the community was eager for more local orchestral concerts. Since Rancho Cordova did not have a performing arts center, the Symphony's initial concerts were held at a local church, where we filled the seats. Later the Symphony began a series of very popular concerts in the food court of local supermarket KP International. And what fun everyone had, pioneering the crazy notion that musicians and the audience would enjoy a classical concert in a food court!

The Symphony and it’s small ensembles have since played at many other locations such as the California Aerospace and California Railroad Museums, a winery on the Sacramento River and under the Capitol Dome - of course! When the Cordova High School Performing Arts Theater opened its doors, Symphony d'Oro was the first community organization to take the stage and a full house. And during the pandemic the Symphony hosted a series of online music lectures hosted by our conductor during Spring/Summer 2020, as well as a series of professionally recorded virtual concerts: holiday concerts in 2020 & 2021, a virtual episode of our popular Poperetta! series (one-part symphony and one part drag queen show!), as well as a Mozart Madness concert in Fall 2021. 

Symphony d'Oro also has commissioned local composers to write original music. Local composer Derek Sup composed and performed a full piano concerto, honoring the life of Debra Miller a Gold River piano teacher whose musical gifts touched and inspired many young students. Ryan Sulieman wrote a piece focused upon the destruction of fires like the Camp Fire (Burning).  Most recently the Symphony commissioned a suite of music in honor of Rancho Cordova’s 20th Anniversary.  The Symphony opened the celebration on June 29, 2023, with the composer Carlos Mc Milan Fuentes at the piano.  A reprise of the suite was performed in November 2023.

The Symphony is planning a very special event in early 2025, when it will perform live to Buster Keaton’s full length, silent movie “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”  The movie was filmed in Sacramento and the historical look at Old Sacramento and the Sacramento River will be as memorable as the original music which has been composed to accompany it.  The performance will be held in a local theatre and open to the public.

The Symphony is led by our creative and fun-loving musical director and conductor Pete Nowlen. A trip to one of our Symphony concerts is not only a harmonious journey--it is a musical education, with the charming conductor teaching the course. For some orchestras you might pay hundreds of dollars each year to soak this all in, but with the exception of one fund-raising concert per year, you experience it all for free because the 60 musicians are all volunteers - doing what they do best to enlighten and enliven the lives of all of us.