David Patrick Stearns

Those funky, menacing chords can only belong to one piece of music: West Side Story, the Leonard Bernstein Broadway musical that updated the Romeo and Juliet story into the world of gang warfare to the streets of post-war New York City. The concert suite from the musical has often been played by The Philadelphia Orchestra, though this week it's performing the music in a different incarnation - as an accompaniment to the 1961 Oscar-winning film. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns reports that the enterprise isn’t nearly as simple as it looks.

In the 100th birthday year of the American avant-garde composer John Cage, many cultural institutions are celebrating his deeply influential life's work. But celebrating Cage is a lot more elusive than celebrating, say, Debussy. Composing with open-ended concepts that often didn't even include notes and rests, Cage threw so much responsibility onto the performers and audiences that it's hard to know what to celebrate. The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns discovers the hidden burdens in Cage's brand of anarchy.

Some rough-and-tumble opening chords can mean only one thing to opera lovers - Puccini’s La Boheme.  The iconic work is back in Philadelphia  for what could feel like the 300th time since first arriving here 114 years ago. Audiences rarely tire of the story of starving artists in 19th-century Paris, or the famous arias that convey the rapture of young love. But they might also feel like it’s a rerun.

The Kimmel Center is the venue for the world premiere of a monumental symphonic gospel work.  Several amassed choirs bring to life an evening-length work by Hannibal Lokumbe, the stubbornly unclassifiable jazz trumpeter and composer.

The new piece is titled, Can You Hear God Crying, the composer's tribute to his great-great grandfather who was born in the Sahara desert, kidnapped in Liberia, sold into slavery in Charleston S.C., but escaped and made his way as a free man to Texas, where L0kumbe was born and still lives.

Philadelphia Orchestra audiences were reminded of what Leopold Stokowski's celebrated hands wrought when, earlier this year, Music Director Designate Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducted a four-concert Stokowski tribute at the theater where it all started a century ago - The Academy of Music.

Her music arrives like a massive glacier - towering, deliberate, and unstoppable. To those who follow modern music, such sounds as these could only be the work of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.

Violinist Tasmin Little has the fingers to play anything and the career to play almost anywhere. Yet on her last trip to Philadelphia, the woman who is widely considered the finest British violinist of her generation made a special trip to play at the German Society of Philadelphia on Spring Garden Street, and did so for the sake of a composer whom she has championed most of her adult life - Frederick Delius. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns visited her at her London home and discovered that her love for Delius is a model for other quixotic causes in her life.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Music Director Designate Yannick Nezet-Seguin made his Saratoga Performing Arts Center debut this week in a trio of concerts that appear to insure, as much as anything can, the Orchestra’s continued presence there. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns reports from Upstate New York.

At age 84, Herbert Blomstedt is one of the most experienced conductors currently on the international circuit. As The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns discovered, the older he gets, the deeper Blomstedt's personal and artistic convictions, and the less he cares if people share them.

This week, the acclaimed Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires announced that she would retire in 2014.  Earlier this year, after an absence of more than a dozen years from the United States, the demure but exquisite Pires returned to perform with The Philadelphia Orchestra. David Patrick Stearns has this appreciation.