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A New Broadcast Season Begins: The Philadelphia Orchestra In Concert on WRTI

Yannick Nezet-Seguin is music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra

The third broadcast season of The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert on WRTI, with host Gregg Whiteside, has begun! Get set for more than 30 recorded concerts from the Philadelphians' current subscription concert season on WRTI every Sunday at 1 pm, and finishing up in mid-June, 2015.

The Orchestra's 115th season began in September with the initiation of the 40/40 Project, a broadening of the ensemble’s repertoire that features 40 works not performed on subscription concerts in at least the last 40 years (or ever), in honor of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s 40th birthday. Philadelphia audiences were asked to vote through electronic and social media, and three favorites were chosen to open the three respective concerts at the end of September.

Pianist Lang Lang

Our first broadcast of the 2014/15 Philadelphia Orchestra season brings us Borodin, Mozart, and Richard Strauss, with pianist Lang Lang and conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

Though it may seem hard to believe, the 40/40 work on Sunday’s program is Alexander Borodin’s In The Steppes of Central Asia, a popular and well-known work, yet one that had not been performed in a regular subscription concert for at least 40 years! We’ll hear it Sunday to open the new season.

Few concertos more delightfully display Mozart’s extraordinary capacity to combine the instrumental and dramatic sides of his genius than the Piano Concerto in G Major. The marvelous final movement reminds us of the great creator of comic operas. Its opening theme breathes the same air as the bird-catcher Papageno in The Magic Flute.

Philadelphia favorite and Curtis Institute of Music graduate Lang Lang returns to perform this joyous concerto.

This season, The Philadelphia Orchestra continues a two-year celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss. The great German composer conducted the Orchestra many times on his two trips to America, in 1904 and 1921. An Alpine Symphony was his final large-scale tone poem, charting a mountain-climbing expedition, observing nature’s wonders, as well as its challenges. WRTI's Susan Lewis spoke with Yannick about this piece, completed in 1915.

It's a majestic work, calling for an enormous orchestra that includes wind and thunder machines, cowbells, and an offstage brass ensemble. Looking back at the indelible imprint that Yannick and the Philadelphians made with their season-ending co-production with Opera Philadelphia of Strauss’s Salome, it seems very fitting that the Orchestra should open its new season with another challenging and thrilling Strauss work.

It’s all yours to enjoy, Sunday, November 16th, 1 to 3 pm on WRTI. The series is sponsored by Bryn Mawr Trust Wealth Management.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor

Lang Lang, piano

PROGRAM:

Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 17, K. 453

INTERMISSION: WRTI’s Jim Cotter speaks backstage with Lang Lang, and WRTI's Susan Lewis interviews Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

R. Strauss: An Alpine Symphony