Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra announces 2024-25 season 

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Next season, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra will embark on its second century as an arts institution and ensemble. While the next 100 years may look and sound much as it did in the last — with a calculated, if conservative, blend of iconic compositions and newer works — the RPO’s 2024-25 season features subtle changes.

The orchestra has announced both the Philharmonics and Pops series for its upcoming season, with three major takeaways for audiences to note.

MORE MATINEES

In a recent interview on WXXI’s talk show “Connections,” RPO Music Director Andreas Delfs pointed out that the orchestra’s practice of presenting Thursday evening concerts was an anomaly in the symphonic world. Starting with the season opener, the RPO will begin a test run in which seven of the 14 Philharmonics concerts in the 2024-25 season will have 2 p.m. performances on Sunday, rather than the typical 7:30 p.m. presentations on Thursdays.

“We asked (our subscribers) what they would feel about it, if we try out a smooth change and a slow move over to a mixture of Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons,” Delfs said. “And they all love the idea. They all gave us ‘thumbs-up’."

The first Philharmonics concert is all the more auspicious for its guest performers — the versatile and virtuosic string trio Time for Three is set to perform Eastman school of music alumnus and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts’s “Contact, Triple Concerto for Two Violins, Bass and Orchestra.”

The RPO also continues its winning formula pairing old and new works by presenting the contemporary triple concerto alongside Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, which Delfs cited as among the most emotionally evocative of the Romantic composer’s music.

“It's probably my favorite Tchaikovsky Symphony," he said.  "It hasn't been done in Rochester in a while and I'm really glad we could find a place for it."

Along with the seven new matinee performances, the in-demand “Sunday Matinees at Naz” series is back, with four concerts (September 15, December 15, March 16 and May 25) highlighting the timeless music of Bach alongside such composers as Beethoven, Debussy, Mendelssohn, and Schubert. This season, the performances at Nazareth University’s Beston Hall in the Glazer Music Performance Center will include reserved seating, rather than general admission.

LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING

Although the RPO has long highlighted works by living composers on its programs — including world premieres — the prevalence of newer pieces is much more noticeable compared to past seasons. Of the 14 Philharmonics concerts in the new season, 11 feature the music of active composers (and that doesn’t include the presence of the late Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s orchestral ode to bird-song, “Cantus Arcticus,” on the program for April 10 and 12, 2025). Missy Mazzoli, Anna Clyne, Roberto Sierra, Carlos Simon, and others appear alongside canonized composers. But in some of the forthcoming concerts, the works of such lionized creators are less obvious.

DEEP CUTS

Perhaps the most subtle of the RPO’s changes for the 2024-25 season is Delfs’s insistence on performing lesser known works by well-known masters.

Dmitri Shotakovich, a 20th-century composer best known for his symphonies, will be featured on October 10 and 12 when his Piano Concerto No. 2 is performed by soloist Natasha Paremski.

Francis Poulenc is another 20th-century titan whose opera “Dialogue of the Carmelites” is more commonly presented than his orchestral works. His concerto for Two Pianos is on the November 9 and 10 program, alongside an RPO-commissioned concerto for two pianos by composer James Lee III.

Rare local performances will take place with Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1  on January 23 and 25, 2025 and Leonard Bernstein’s obscure “Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium),” featuring violinist Tessa Lark in an all-American program of music by Gershwin, Aaron Copland and John Adams, on May 3 and 4.

HITS AND FLICKS

The 2024-25 Pops season offers much of what makes the series enduringly popular, including a live-to-screen performance of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1” on October 18 and 19; celebrations of Broadway and American music legends Louis Armstrong and George Gershwin in January and April 2025, respectively; and an evening devoted to the game-changing music of cinematic composer John Williams on February 15, 2025.

But while Tyzik is happy to present audiences with time-tested favorites, he also looks to present different styles less common to an orchestral setting. The series-opening “Disco Divas” on October 4 and 5, featuring vocalists Shayna Steele, Ashley Jayy and Kelly LeVesque, is a case in point.

“A lot of those songs that were hits, the orchestra was playing in the background,” Tyzik said. “And the same thing with Motown music — you had strings. It was a lot of the strings from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and you had brass and French horns. It's a very symphonic presentation.”

In addition to the RPO’s standard holiday fare of Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker (November 27, 29, 30; December 1), Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” (December 12) and Tyzik’s Gala Holiday Pops concert (December 20-22), the orchestra presents a live performance of one of the most beloved films of all time, “The Wizard of Oz," on January 15.

For more information and season tickets, visit rpo.org.

Daniel J. Kushner is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].