Join us for an evening with Adam Stern, acclaimed conductor. ADAM STERN was appointed Music Director of the Sammamish Symphony in the summer of 2015, after having served for several months as Interim Conductor. He brings more than forty years of conducting experience to the orchestra, as well as his characteristic programming which blends time-honored classics with little-known rarities. Stern also conducts the Seattle Philharmonic, of which he has been Music Director since 2003, and which has presented numerous world, U.S. and West Coast premieres under Stern's direction. The Port Angeles Symphony, which played under Stern's music directorship from 2005 until 2014, also enjoyed years of tradition and innovation as well as a widely-acknowledged and -acclaimed rise in its musical standards.
One of the most exciting shifts in the piano world right now is the rise of battery-powered, portable pianos. Instruments like Roland’s GO:PIANO88 show that full-sized keybeds, high-quality sound engines, and wireless operation can coexist. Roland
Across the U.S., piano sales have taken a nosedive. A recent CBS News article reported that in 2024, only 17,294 pianos were sold — compared to hundreds of thousands in past decades. CBS News The reason isn’t lack of interest in music; it’s economics, cultural change, and preference shifts. Young people are renting, using digital subscriptions, or choosing digital pianos as introductory tools.
In 2025, one of the most fascinating developments in piano technology is happening at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and musical expression. A research team recently introduced PANDORA, a diffusion-based policy learning framework that enables robotic hands to play piano pieces with precision and expressive nuance. The system uses language models to measure stylistic quality and musicality, blending human emotion with algorithmic accuracy. arXiv