Home to some of the most popular and recognizable tunes in classical music, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto was an instant success and remains one of the most-performed orchestra pieces today. It will be in good hands (apologies) with Olga Kern, who won first prize at the Rachmaninoff International Piano competition at age 17 and remains the only woman to win the Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The concert opens with Reena Esmail’s Testament, which features traditional Hindustani melodies and easily demonstrates why Esmail’s music is receiving so much play these days.

Beethoven's Piano Trio in D Major got the nickname "Ghost" because of its ominous and spooky slow movement. It's eerie, mournful, and almost painfully slow. In contrast, the two movements that surround it are short, cheerful and light-hearted, making for an interesting spooky sandwich. George Bernard Shaw wrote of Beethoven that "he could write music whose beauty will last you all your life; he could take the driest sticks of themes and work them up so interestingly that you will find something new in them at the hundredth hearing." Listen and enjoy the simple "sticks" of themes in the very beginning of both outer movements.

The Summer Season concludes with two pieces from Richard Strauss: his tone poem Death and Transfiguration and the suite from his opera Der Rosenkavalier. Tone poems are compositions that relate to stories in the “real world,” such as a hike in the alps in Eine Alpensinfonie. This one explores mystery of death and what lies beyond. Strauss wrote: “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.” The Rosenkavalier gives us the finest music from Strauss’s happy, funny, and sentimental opera. Listen for the famous waltz towards the end – a beautiful but also funny bit because waltzes didn’t really exist during the time of the opera’s setting in Mozart’s Vienna. Critics of the day gave Strauss a hard time for that, but we get to enjoy it.