Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Beethoven and Brahms — With Emanuel Ax

The Philadelphia Orchestra's 125th anniversary season in 2025 also marks the 50th anniversary of its first collaboration with the great Emanuel Ax, who returns to Philadelphia alongside charismatic music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to perform one of the crown jewels of the concert repertoire: Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, comprising two propulsive and thrilling C-minor movements around a supremely romantic Adagio in E major. Yannick also opens the program with a poetic and playful premiere — the newly restored five-movement version of Wood Notes by William Grant Still, often called the "Dean of African American music" for his pioneering contributions as a composer and conductor — and closes it with Brahms's Rhineland-inspired Third Symphony in F, a compact and personal masterpiece that Antonín Dvořák said "surpasses [Brahms's] first two symphonies" in beauty.

Photo © Pete Checchia