On June 6 and 7 conductor Benjamin Zander returns to Carnegie Hall with his acclaimed Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (BPYO) to give two free concerts with two separate and ambitious programs, an unprecedented feat by a youth orchestra. 

Concert-goers will be in for an added treat when the maestro offers a 45 minute-long, preconcert talk on music, leadership and possibility thinking, his first in New York. Zander’s ability to inspire is why he was asked to deliver three keynote and closing addresses at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Some eight million viewers have tuned into Zander’s now legendary TED talk  http://bit.ly/1gmJpzP.  His best-selling book “The Art of Possibility,” co-written with his former wife Rosamund Zander, has been translated into 17 languages.

A mere four years old, the orchestra consists of 120 young people, ranging in age from 12 to 21 and chosen through highly selective auditions. Under Zander’s guidance, the BPYO has been molded into an orchestra taken seriously by the international music world, from Yo Yo Ma to Simon Rattle. After hearing the orchestra, Rattle noted, “it was completely astounding… a performance that blew the pros away.” When the BPYO made its Carnegie Hall debut in 2013, The New York Times said “brilliantly played, fervently felt” and “the concert was one that any music lover would savor.”

Zander himself started composing music at the age of nine and came to the attention of towering composer Benjamin Britten with whom he studied. BPYO is a continuation of Zander’s life’s work, who has spent decades educating people in both music and the art of possibility. Bringing the two worlds together to develop young people is the essence of the youth orchestra. 

This go-round at Carnegie Hall, the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra reprises two high-intensity programs that had close to 1500 people clamoring for tickets the first day they went on sale and lines snaking around Boston’s Symphony Hall for a quarter of a mile. The Boston concerts received raucously enthusiastic standing ovations from attendees and extraordinary praise from critics. In a city blessed with an abundance of classical music talent, the BYPO was singled out by Boston’s ArtsFuse magazine, which named their concert the best orchestral performance of 2015.

CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT PROGRAMS

Monday, June 6 & Tuesday, June 7, 2016 / 8 PM Stern Auditorium

June 6

Glinka / Overture to “Ruslan and Ludmila”
Stravinsky / Violin Concerto in D Major
Debussy / “La Mer”
Tchaikovsky / Symphony No. 5 in E Minor

June 7

Beethoven / Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”
Stravinsky / “The Rite of Spring”

Individuals can obtain up to 4 free tickets per person for each concert by visiting: https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2016/6/6/0800/PM/Boston-Philharmonic-Youth-Orchestra/