Serenade
Yannick Nezet-Seguin, conductor; Hilary Hahn, violin
Our tribute to Leonard Bernstein continues with his Serenade—a musical retelling of Plato’s ode to love—written for his friend Isaac Stern and recorded to great critical acclaim by our 2017-18 artist-in-residence, Hilary Hahn, when she was 18, five years after she made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut. Opera Philadelphia received raves when it staged the local premiere of Thomas Adès’s lascivious Powder Her Face in 2013. In this Philadelphia Orchestra co-commission, Yannick leads the first U.S. performances of a suite of music from the ripped-from-the-tabloids opera. Finally, a melancholy clarinet solo heralds the opening of Sibelius’s First Symphony, giving way to an explosion of sound evoking a sparkling Scandinavian panorama.
