This weekend, the North Carolina Symphony premieres a new holiday piece by Laurelyn Dossett. “The Gathering, A Winter’s Tale in Six Songs" features some of today’s most noted musicians, writers and singers in old time and traditional music circles. A four-piece string band will perform the song series live with the North Carolina Symphony at Meymandi Concert Hall at the Progress Energy Center in downtown Raleigh on November 25, 2011, at 8pm and November 26, 2011 at 3pm and 8pm.

Last year when the North Carolina Symphony asked songwriter Laurelyn Dossett to write a song cycle for a holiday concert, she said, “Yes.”

“Then I went home and googled song cycle,’” Dossett says.

As Dossett learned from her Google search, a song cycle is a group of songs performed in a narrative sequence. The narrative she wrote is a story about a daughter going home for the holidays and the family preparing for her arrival.

“I was trying to celebrate all the things we love about family gatherings, as well as capture the more complicated things about it,” Dossett says. “I also wanted to share images of the region in the winter: the clear Carolina nights, the lights in the lowlands, the frost in the trees and the diamonds in the pines.

“These songs were written specifically to work with the Symphony, as well as stand on their own,” Dossett says. “To tell a story of a journey home on a winter’s night.

“To help set a time and place for that story, and to set the atmosphere that’s uniquely North Carolinian, I chose these string band musicians—who also have the virtuosity to play with the symphony.”

This performance features the Symphony and Music Director Grant Llewellyn together with the Concert Singers of Cary and a four-piece string band hand-picked by Dossett for the performances.

The quartet features Dossett, Rhiannon Giddens Laffan from the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, mandolinist Mike Compton from Elvis Costello’s Sugarcanes band and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? recordings, as well as singer and banjo player Joe Newberry of North Carolina’s Big Medicine.

“For many of us, the holidays are about the desire to go home, to be with our loved ones and reconnect with our roots, “ says Symphony General Manager & Vice President of Artistic Operations Scott Freck. “With this program we invite the audience to experience that feeling, with familiar and favorite holiday songs, the distinctive sounds of a North Carolina string band, and Laurelyn Dossett’ s magnificent new piece which is all about the return of a long-lost but beloved family member.”

Dossett is known for writing songs that set a time and place for a story. She’s written music for four plays featuring North Carolina folklore. Dossett recently performed one of those songs with the North Carolina Symphony in July 2011 for its pirate-themed performances. She first performed with the Symphony in 2009 for the “Blue Skies and Golden Sands” tour, celebrating the region’s musical connection to the coast.

Symphony fans will also recognize Giddens Laffan, who recently performed with Llewellyn in “Around the World in 80 Minutes” last summer at Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary. Newberry, the holiday string-band banjoist, was one of the chief architects of the Symphony’s “Blue Skies and Red Earth” and “Blue Skies and Golden Sands” tours in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and also performed with the orchestra in its 2006 New Year’s Eve concert and on the “Branford Marsalis and Friends” benefit concert on June 8, 2010.

The string band quartet is also releasing a holiday compact disc of the music that features the stringed arrangements, which will be available online and at concert performances.