Leonard Slatkin conducts Mazzoli, MacDowell and Tchaikovsky – With Andre Watts

This concert, conducted by the orchestra's music director Leonard Slatkin, highlights the work of a young contemporary composer, Missy Mazzoli. "One of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" according to the New York Times, Missy Mazzoli was commissioned to compose River Rouge Transfiguration by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra after winning the 2011 Elaine Lebenbom competition.

The programme also puts the American pianist Andre Watts in the spotlight, with a rendition of Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2. A first class musician, Andre Watts took the world by storm at only 16, when Leonard Bernstein himself chose him to perform for the Young People's Concerts. A few weeks afterwards, he replaced Glenn Gould at short notice for a concert with the New York Philharmonic. MacDowell's second piano concerto was written in 1890. It is the composer's best-known work.

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 closes the concert. This highly emotional score was written in 1877, when the composer's life was at a turning point: engaged in an unhappy marriage with Antonina Milioukova, he started was starting a relationship with Nadezhda von Meck.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin have recorded several records together, all of them were released on the Naxos label.

© Picture: Steve J. Sherman

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Live from Orchestra Hall webcast series is presented by the Ford Motor Company Fund and made possible by generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.