Marc-André Hamelin Performs “Emperor”

In his concluding season as Principal Conductor, Bernard Labadie welcomes longtime friend and collaborator Marc-André Hamelin—”a performer of near-superhuman technical prowess” (The New York Times)—to join New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s as soloist. Together they perform the last-completed and largest-scale of Beethoven’s five piano concertos, a grand and virtuosic work ahead of its time in its exploration of the piano’s technical possibilities. The orchestra opens the performance with the introduction to Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, followed by Mozart’s masterful Symphony No. 39.