For the first time in over 32 years, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra will perform outside the QC – on Monday, April 5, 2027, the professional orchestra will close its 112th season with a third Masterworks VI concert at the new Goldfarb Center for Performing Arts, on Western Illinois University’s campus, Macomb.
After its traditional Saturday and Sunday concerts in Davenport and Rock Island, the QCSO will hit the road and play the program Monday night at the $119-million center, which formally opens in September 2026.
The concert will feature Carlos Chávez’s rhythmic, vibrant “Sinfonía India,” before cellist Tommy Mesa returns to the area to perform Michael Abels’s newly commissioned cello concerto. The season concludes with the warmth and joy of Dvořák’s spirited Eighth Symphony.
A part of the QCSO long-term strategy is to find ways for the ensemble to perform outside the area, executive director Brian Baxter said Wednesday, May 6th.
“Because the level of our orchestra is so high. We have this incredible orchestra here, and we want to start offering that to other communities more regionally to kind of help get our name further out there,” he said. “So we've been exploring a lot of opportunities. And in terms of this particular one with the Goldfarb Performing Arts Center, honestly, it was Patrick Downing who reached out to me, kind of talking about what they were doing at Western Illinois University.”
The Goldfarb Center has been in the works for many years, and there’s a lot of excitement around it in Macomb, Baxter said. The 100,000-square-foot, $119-million facility has been under construction since September 2022 and is named for Alvin Goldfarb, who served as 10th president of WIU, from 2002 to 2011.
Downing of Davenport, is a 2009 WIU music alum, who’s worked as director of development for Western’s College of Fine Arts and Communications since November 2024. He splits his time between the WIU-Quad Cities campus in Moline and Macomb (an hour and a half south of the QC), about once or twice a week.
“We met with Anne Lefter, their director, and the rest is kind of history,” Baxter said of the Goldfarb Center head. “So we are really, really excited to be presenting our final Masterworks for next season a third time, not just the two normal times we do, and it'll be on Monday in Macomb. It's just a really great opportunity and we're really thrilled about it."
The QCSO has not performed outside the metro QC area since the James Dixon era (1965-1994), the former University of Iowa orchestra director and QCSO conductor who had led some performances in Iowa City, Baxter said. “I think that was probably a product of his being there."
“This is a great opportunity for the orchestra to do a touring concert for their Masterworks series,” Downing said Wednesday, May 6. “I know they will sound amazing in the new venue. And we've had a great history, too, of WIU alumni and School of Music faculty performing in the orchestra as members or substitutes and just musicians in general. And I think this is a great way for the two campus communities to come together.”
After the music school director asked about featuring a regional orchestra in the new center (which has seven main guest one-night performances in 2026-27), Downing reached out to Baxter.
“We immediately thought of the Quad City Symphony, with our WIU Quad Cities campus in Moline, and thought this would be a great way to tie the two campus communities together by having the musicians perform both in the Quad Cities and being able to make the trip to Macomb to play,” Downing said.
“This is a great opportunity for them to play in a brand-new performance venue. And I'm thrilled that we will be able to provide that to them because I think they're going to be embraced by a brand-new audience down there.”
The center construction was completely funded by the state of Illinois, through Rebuild Illinois and the Capital Development Board, the first new building on the Macomb campus in almost 40 years, Downing said. His job includes raising money for ongoing programming, operations, and equipment. The center staff will be WIU employees.
When he was a student, concerts and shows took place at the COFAC Recital Hall (375 seats), and the Western Hall basketball arena (where Downing saw a touring production of “RENT” and the rock musician Elvis Costello).
The Goldfarb Center Great Hall will seat 875 (less than QCSO venue Centennial Hall, which seats 1,500), and a Studio Theater seating 200. The first student theatrical production in the main hall will be next April’s “Into the Woods,” Downing said.
“The thought of having a dedicated performing arts venue for these shows was always in the back of the students’ minds,” he said. “It's a building that's really been talked about for 40, some will tell you 50 years on the campus. So really is a long-awaited dream that's finally, finally, finally coming true.”
“Macomb is around 20,000 people and this is going to be a pretty significant venue for a small town in the middle of a cornfield,” Downing said, noting it will help attract bigger, better tours to campus. “Also, it's a great economic and tourism driver for the city and the region.
"So the more people that will come to attend shows at the Goldfarb Center, that's great for local restaurants, lodging, hotels and area businesses," he said. "And Macomb really prides itself on being an excellent town for small business and up-and-coming businesses with great partnerships with the university and I think with audience draw too, is that this isn't just for, for the people of Macomb. We're hoping this will also attract folks from Peoria, Quad Cities, Southeast Iowa, Northeast Missouri, Hannibal, Quincy, Illinois, Galesburg.
“There will not be a venue like this, of this size and this caliber,” Downing added. “You'd have to go to either Hancher at the University of Iowa or Krannert at Illinois Champaign for something of this magnitude.
"Which is why we're so thrilled that the Quad City Symphony has accepted the invitation for us to welcome them into the new hall, to give them an opportunity," he said. "They're a world-class orchestra getting to play in a brand-new, world-class performance venue.”
Downing is himself a singer and pianist, and has performed in mass choirs with the QCSO about 10 times (including the Beethoven’s Ninth twice, “Carmina Burana,” plus requiems by Verdi, Brahms, Mozart and Britten).
“I'm thrilled that the Symphony is on board for this. I know they're going to be embraced by the Macomb community and beyond when they head there in April,” he added.
The new concerto from Michael Abels (a close friend of QCSO music director Mark Russell Smith) is part of a consortium the orchestra has commissioned with the Dallas (Texas) Symphony and Richmond (Virginia) Symphony, written for Tommy Mesa, who has performed with the QCSO, “and is wonderful,” Baxter said. “It's a really cool work.”
“It is really special. It's a nice program,” he added. “With Dvorak, you’ve got a really great masterwork alongside a brand new work. And the Carlos Chavez is super colorful, a wonderful piece too. So I'm really excited about it. I mean it's a great opportunity for us to kind of continue to help strengthen ties between the Quad Cities and Macomb. Of course we have a Western Illinois campus here, but I think it's a really wonderful opportunity to build back and forth between the two communities.
"Because I think we're not right next door obviously, but we're close enough," Baxter said. "And you know, we have a few folks that come to see our concerts regularly from Macomb, but not a ton.
“So it'd be wonderful to, I don’t know what the Goldfarb's plans are, but if things go well and they want to keep bringing us back, we'd love to make it a regular kind of run-out performance,” he said.
The late Dean of the WIU College of Fine Arts and Communication (COFAC), William T. “Billy” Clow (1962-2025) was the driving force behind the Goldfarb Center for Performing Arts, Al Goldfarb (professor emeritus and former president) wrote on the WIU website.
“I was so honored and humbled by his efforts to have this momentous Western Illinois University facility named after me. I was even more honored to have Billy, who was one of my graduate students, refer to me as his mentor.
“Billy recognized how significant the GCPA will be for Western Illinois University, the local community and the region. He wanted it referred to as a Center for Performing Arts, emphasizing “center” because he realized that it would impact all West Central Illinois artistically, economically, and educationally. Billy’s dedication to COFAC and to the GCPA was unmatched by anyone," Goldfarb wrote.
"Without Billy’s advocacy and perseverance, this facility, which was first proposed in the 1970s, and which had two previous groundbreakings prior to its actual one in October 2022, would never have become a reality.”
“I have really purposely tried to curate a season that gives us reasons to come together in joy and experience the arts,” GCPA director Anne Lefter recently told Tri States Public Radio.
The first event in the Great Hall is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16. The Milwaukee-based bluegrass band Chicken Wire Empire will be the theater’s debut act.
“They’ve been making a huge splash the last few years, and I really think we caught them right at the moment when they’re going to ascend,” Lefter said. “I think in a couple of years we won’t be able to get them because they’re going to break big.”
For more information on the center, click HERE.
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