Marin Alsop Leads Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Frank

Like her mentor Leonard Bernstein, Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop is convinced that music has the power to change lives. She’s also enormously entertaining to watch, as you’ll see in this program that features Mendelssohn’s poetic, passionate Violin Concerto. Performing this bravura display of the instrument’s range and emotional power is the astonishing young violinist Randall Goosby, who “plays like an angel with nothing to prove” (Los Angeles Times).

The Mendelssohn is flanked by a pair of dazzling works: Brahms’s intricate Variations on a Theme of Haydn, whose contrapuntal shifts present a brilliant puzzle for the artists of the Orchestra to solve, and former Composer in Residence Gabriela Lena Frank’s Picaflor (Hummingbird), a vibrant new work that retells a traditional Peruvian creation myth.