Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

Rafael Payare, music director
Yefim Bronfman, piano

Saturday, March 11, 2023, 8:00 PM

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Concert Hall

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal
Rafael Payare, music director
Yefim Bronfman, piano
Mon, Mar 6, 8 p.m.
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

The celebrated Orchestre symphonique de Montréal returns to Washington Performing Arts at the dawn of a new era, as it welcomes the exciting Venezuelan-born conductor Rafael Payare as its ninth music director. A graduate of his home country’s renowned El Sistema, Payare has been hailed as “a prodigious artist who combines a rare gift of auditory perfection with a profound, delicate, intense, quivering sensitivity” (Le Monde, France).

Complementing this “new beginning” on the bill is a longtime favorite of Washington Performing Arts audiences: Yefim “Fima” Bronfman. The great Israeli-American pianist joins the OSM for Bartók’s technically imposing, ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 2—a work featured on Bronfman’s 1997 Grammy Award-winning recording of Bartók concerti. The OSM rounds out the program with Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 5 and with Precipice, a compact and ethereal work commissioned by the OSM from contemporary American-born, Canadian-resident composer Dorothy Chang.

Note: Yefim Bronfman also appears in recital on Tuesday, April 4.

This performance is an external rental presented in coordination with the Kennedy Center Campus Rentals Office and is not produced by the Kennedy Center.

Program Details

DOROTHY CHANG – Precipice
BARTÓK – Piano Concerto No. 2
MAHLER – Symphony No. 5

Our Partners

This performance is made possible through the generous support of The Linda and Isaac Stern Charitable Foundation, In Memory of Isaac Stern.

Washington Performing Arts’s classical music performances this season are made possible in part through the generous support of Betsy and Robert Feinberg.

This is one of twenty 2022/23 season performances included in Washington Performing Arts’s The World in Our City initiative, which promotes cross-cultural understanding and cultural diplomacy via the presentation of international visiting artists, globally inspired local programming, and the award-winning Embassy Adoption Program, a partnership with D.C. Public Schools.

Special thanks to the following lead supporters of Washington Performing Arts’s mission-driven work: Jacqueline Badger Mars and Mars, Incorporated; D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Program and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; and the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts.