Internationally renowned Austrian conductor leads the NSO in music by three leading Viennese composers. Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite is originally for string quartet, but Graf conducts three movements from this intensely passionate and lyrical score in an arrangement for string orchestra.

Haochen Zhang, First Prize winner at the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition, is the soloist in Mozart’s darkly dramatic D-minor Piano Concerto, after which we turn to Beethoven’s sunny, bucolic Pastoral Symphony, into which the composer poured his love of nature and rustic beauty: “No picture,” he wrote, “but something in which the emotions aroused by the pleasures of the country are expressed, or something in which some feelings of country life are set forth.”

This symphony is understandably an audience favorite around the world.