Andreas Delfs has just been named the new Music Director of your Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and he has a long and ambitious agenda for the organization as it heads into its centenary year. Julia Figueras sat down with Maestro Delfs in an empty Restaurant Good Luck to talk with him about that to-do list, with a speed round to wrap it up.
CITY's arts editor Daniel Kushner also interviewed Delfs, and provides these highlights of the 2021-22 Philharmonics Series season:
- 23 and 25: Delfs leads the orchestra in the Romantic-era selections “Dawn & Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” by Wagner and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, as well as Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, featuring violin soloist Benjamin Beilman.
- 24 and 26, 2022: Delfs conducts Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor” (with soloist Jorge Osorio) and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, alongside “Something for the Dark” by Sarah Kirkland Snider.
- April 14 and 16, 2022: Guest conductor Ken-David Masur — music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra — leads the RPO in the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s Piano Concerto with pianist Awadagin Pratt, as well as Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, also known as “Reformation.”
- May 5 and 7, 2022: Delfs conducts the world premiere of Roberto Sierra’s Violin Concerto with RPO Concertmaster Juliana Athayde as soloist, along with performances of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, famously dubbed “Unfinished,” and additional pieces by Mendelssohn and Johann Strauss Jr.