Palm Beach Symphony Season Culminates with Kennedy Center Honoree Midori and Three Additions to the Repertoire

Recent Kennedy Center Honor Awardee for Lifetime Artistic Achievement Midori joins Palm Beach Symphony in a spectacular season finale with Music Director Gerard Schwarz at the podium on Sunday, April 10 at 3 p.m. at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

The acclaimed violin virtuoso will perform Korngold's Violin Concerto in D Major. As a famous Jewish composer, Korngold found a safe haven in Hollywood during WWII and this lush symphonic work contains all of his Viennese romanticism as he vividly interweaves music from four of his film scores.

Midori regularly transfixes audiences around the world, bringing together graceful precision and intimate expression, and this year she celebrates the 40th anniversary of conductor Zubin Mehta inviting her, then only 11 years old, to perform with the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra's annual New Year's Eve concert, where the foundation was laid for her career.

Midori has performed with, among others, the London, Chicago and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. She has collaborated with such outstanding musicians as Claudio Abbado, Emanuel Ax, Leonard Bernstein, Jonathan Biss, Constantinos Carydis, Christoph Eschenbach, Daniel Harding, Paavo Järvi, Mariss Jansons, Yo-Yo Ma, Susanna Mälkki, Joana Mallwitz, Antonello Manacorda, Zubin Mehta, Donald Runnicles, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Omer Meir Wellber.

In announcing her Kennedy Center Honor, Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein said, "With an international presence for over 35 years, violinist Midori combines graceful precision and expression for performances building connections between art and the human experience."

The emotionally evocative program adds three works to the Symphony's repertoire with the Korngold concerto, the melodious, cheerful and upbeat Symphony No. 8 by Dvořák and William Schuman's New England Triptych with its spirited homage to the 18th century American composer William Billings and his countrymen and women who founded our nation.

Maestro Schwarz is also tremendously active in South Florida as the Music Director of the Frost Symphony Orchestra and the Distinguished Professor of Music, Conducting and Orchestral Studies at University of Miami's Frost School of Music. Nationally, he is the Music Director of the Eastern Music Festival and Mozart Orchestra of New York as well as Conductor Laureate of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Emeritus of the Mostly Mozart Festival. A prolific recording artist with 14 GRAMMY nominations, he recently released a recording of Schubert's Symphony No. 9 with the New York Chamber Symphony and his extensive catalogue of more than 350 recordings on 11 labels includes The Gerard Schwarz Collection, a 30-CD box set.

Palm Beach Symphony returns to CBS 12 News and CW34 for with its first broadcast of a Fourth of July special concert this summer.

Tickets to the Symphony's final performance this season are $25-$95 and are available online at www.palmbeachsymphony.org; by phone at (561) 281-0145; or by visiting the Palm Beach Symphony Box Office, Monday-Friday from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. The Kravis Center is located at 701 Okeechobee Blvd in West Palm Beach.

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