The Atlanta Symphony Hall in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, played Saturday night host to the latest stop on Lindsey Stirling’s Night with the Symphony Tour as she performed in front of a sold-out crowd with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Giel. Built as part of the Woodruff Arts Center in 1968, the nearly 1,800 capacity Symphony Hall is one of three not-for-profit arts divisions on its campus, which also includes the Alliance Theatre and the High Museum of Art.
With a capacity crowd patiently waiting and the orchestra seated in position, the house lights dimmed dark at precisely 8:00pm with Giel taking his position on the podium. Appearing out from the side curtain, Stirling smiled and strolled across the ASO stage in a flowing dress and large hair bow, starting off her evening with “Underground,” a single pulled from her fifth studio album, Artemis (2019).
Admittedly I was only casually familiar with Stirling going into the show, but she exceeded all my expectations. Not only is she an award-winning, world-class violinist, but when you combine that talent with her ballet dancing expertise, her performance becomes a gasping display of uniqueness in line with a solo Cirque Du Soleil experience in Las Vegas. She played the violin with a passionate purpose across two difference sets, luring fans into a musical trance that encouraged just “being in the moment,” as I did not see a single audience cell phone recording all evening.
Between songs, Stirling exposed her sensitive and disarming personality, reflecting on everything from her emotional and mental health struggles over the years with anxiety and depression, to jokingly becoming and embracing her mantle as the internet’s “video game queen” due to some of her early YouTube musical creations that bolstered her cult following. Moreover, she also highlighted more than once during the night how inspiring it was to play her songs re-imagined with an orchestra of such talent.
While Stirling obviously mixed in some of her more mainstream hits in “Shatter Me” and “Crystallize,” she also showcased a bit of her newer work off her most recent and seventh studio album, Duality (2024), including tracks “Evil Twin” and “Serenity Found,” along with “Untamed” and “Eye of the Untold Her” that ultimately closed out her Atlanta set in back-to-back powerful renditions.
Not to be lost in how captivating Stirling’s musical performance was on Saturday night was her reinforced messages of both humor and hope, which I found wholesome and refreshing, as there were many families in attendance. In fact, leading into her final song of the night, she discussed processing the negative “you are not good enough” feedback she received from the judges as a quarter-finalist on America’s Got Talent (2010, season five), but outlined how she used that as inspiration by just adding a single word to the end of that phrase to turn her life around … “yet.” Stirling easily won me over, and I am no longer “yet” to be a fan.
Following a short break, Stirling will pick this symphony-supported tour back up with back-to-back dates at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on July 11th and 12th. The Night with the Symphony Tour will then round out with two final dates, including the Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Washington, on July 19th, and the Deer Valley Music Festival in Park City, Utah, on Friday, July 25th.
Touring Band
Drew Steen – Drums, percussion
Ryan Riveros – Keyboards, guitars
Setlist:
SET 1
1.) Underground
2.) The Arena
3.) Transcendence
4.) Shatter Me
5.) Danse Macabre (Camille Saint-Saens cover – sat in with Symphony)
6.) Evil Twin
7.) Mirage
8.) Phantom of the Opera Medley (Andrew Lloyd Webber cover)
SET 2
9.) Crystallize
10.) Serenity Found
11.) Between Twilight
12.) Take Flight
13.) Video Game Medley
14.) Roundtable Rival
15.) Untamed
16.) Eye of the Untold Her
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Elliott is a music photographer covering shows in Atlanta, Georgia, and the surrounding area. The highlight of his photography career was back in the early ’90s, when he sold Neil Diamond the rights to his negatives from a show and then purchased a set of tires for his 1979 280ZX during college with the money.
