Remember pacing and brooding and worrying through the particularly intense COVID months? Waiting and hoping for many things, of course, but certainly the opportunity to hear music together again, as when the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra returned to the Garde Arts Center last October for their 75th season?

Well, heck, now it's May and, on Saturday in that same delightful venue, the ECSO will already perform the finale of the 2021-22 campaign. But don't be sad.

As suggested by the program's title, "Joyful Dances," we all need an event to celebrate life, music and community. Under the direction of music director and conductor Toshiyuki "Toshi" Shimada, the orchestra will first nuance Beethoven's 1803 Triple Concerto with guest soloists Elissa Lee Koljonen (violin), Sophie Shao (cello) and Eva Virsik (piano).

Up next is Florence Price's Dances in the Canebrakes, a jazz-sparkled three-part suite orchestrated by William Grant Still, known in the Harlem Renaissance as "the dean of Afro-American Composers."

The evening concludes majestically with the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and an interpretation of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy." The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus will nimbly join in, along with soprano Sarah Yanovitch, mezzo-soprano Carolyn O'Dwyer, tenor Brian Cheney and bass-baritone Gregory Flower.

Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Garde Arts Center, 325 State St., New London; $12-$65; www.ectsymphony.com, (860) 443-2876.