Arts Desk

Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David Kim, who has played Bruch’s First Violin Concerto as soloist many times, has his own routine to prepare for a performance with The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is now known as a classical music giant. But in 1866, he was a young man who had switched careers and was tackling his very first symphony. WRTI’s Susan Lewis has more on this early work – titled by the composer, Winter Daydreams.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin loves Mahler's Symphony No.5 for many reasons. One is that it's a work that epitomizes everything that orchestral music can be. 

Congratulations to composer Kile Smith and The Crossing! The Philadelphia-based choir's 2019 recording of Kile's The Arc in the Sky is up for a 2020 GRAMMY award for Best Choral Performance. Kile and Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing, visited WRTI soon after the album's release in July of 2019 to share insights about this artistic collaboration.

Mozart played both violin and viola, and wrote his Sinfonia Concertante for those two instruments in 1779  after a trip to Paris and Mannheim, where the form was popular.  

Born in Shanghai in 1990, pianist Haochen Zhang won the Van Cliburn Competition in 2009, which launched his career. He went on to win an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2017, and today he's an international star, receiving kudos from media outlets around the globe. “Such a combination of enchanting, sensitive lyricism and hypnotizing forcefulness is a phenomenon encountered very rarely," says The Jerusalem Post. Two of his favorite things: Rachmaninoff and Philadelphia.

Repulsed by the brutality against women in the story, A Thousand and One Nights, composer John Adams created a dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra where the solo violin represents a modern, young woman who stands up to her oppressors. WRTI's Susan Lewis has more on Scheherazade.2.

Antonin Dvorak wrote his Symphony No. 9, "From the New World," soon after arriving in America in 1893.  A yearning melody from the second movement took on a new life as a popular American song that continues to be reinvented.