PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The Mann Center opens its 2012 season with a free concert featuring the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

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“There’s going to be dancers, there’s going to be fireworks, and there’s going to be glorious music, says Catherine Cahill, President and CEO of the Mann.

She also says the concert is a gift to the City of Philadelphia and will also kick off the Curtis Institute’s European tour.

“The evening is a program with Brahms and Bernstein, and the dancers are from the Rock School of Dance, and they will be dancing scenes from none other than Bernstein’s beloved ‘West Side Story.’”

Curtis alum Rossen Millanov will conduct the orchestra, and Cahill says concert-goers will get an experience like no other.

“The Mann, indeed, is what summer sounds like,” Cahill adds.

The concert takes place on May 11th at 8 p.m. For more info, go to www.manncenter.org.

The Curtis Symphony Orchestra will perform three selections on February 12th, including Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety” and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.

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”The energy, someone in the audience might feel it.”

Award-winning cellist Sarah Rommel says the program will take the audience on a journey through the 20th century that will allow listeners to feel with freedom.

”You can think whatever you want to think, feel whatever you want to feel and nothing will ever be wrong.”

The 22-year-old says she is excited to work with Miguel Harth-Bedoya, a featured conductor who is also a 1991 Curtis graduate.

”A combination of younger musicians and a younger conductor, it’s going to be fun.”

The Curtis Symphony Orchestra will perform at the Kimmel Center on February 12th at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $5 to $45. For more information, visit www.kimmelcenter.org.

Di Wu (pronounced Dee Woo) will be at the piano. She’s a 2005 Curtis graduate who dreamt of a night like this.

“I’ve been to many, many performances where I walked by ( the Kimmel) and said… I wish my name will be on the billboard someday.”

Now it is, as the Curtis Symphony Orchestra performs its spring concert, featuring the rarely performed Messiaen’s ”Turangalila-symphonie.”

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When 26 year old Di Wu plays the piano, you feel her intensity and hear her artistry.

“It’s a thing that is part of me,” Wu says. “It makes me who I am, my passion. It sounds cliché but this is what I want to think about .. this is what I want to talk about.”

Performing with Maestro Eschenbach is a thrill for Wu. ”It’s obvious that I’ll be a fan girl, but I’m looking forward to it and looking forward to what I am going to learn from him.

Di Wu first came to Curtis ten years ago, to study piano. Born in China, Di knew at an early age that performing music at its highest level would become the focus of her life.

That doesn’t surprise David Ludwig, the chairman of Curtis’ Department of Performance.

“The students are in many ways, like Olympic athletes,” says Ludwig. ”Some, you don’t even teach. You guide them, so they can effectively maximize their artistic potential.”

There are 160 undergraduate students at Curtis, where less than four percent of applicants are accepted. That makes it the toughest school to get into in the country.

When the best of the best come together as an orchestra, Ludwig says much of it is magical, you can’t hold onto it.”

Wu describes the 118 page piano score that is her responsibility as incredibly colorful, complicated and extravagant. For her, performing at Verizon Hall at the Kimmel is more than exciting.

Wu says, “It fulfills a certain sense of accomplishment.”

For more on Curtis, you can link to www.curtis.edu.

Reported by Pat Ciarrocchi, CBS 3

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-March 19 and 20 – Orchestra 2001 plays Hindemith, Berio and Roberto Sierra. Julianne Baird, soprano; Marcantonio Barone, piano, Lori Barnett, cello are featured. The performance on the 19th is at the Trinity Center in Center City, Philadelphia, on the 20th at Swarthmore College.

- March 22 – the Philadelphia chapter of the American Composers Forum presents a webcast interview with George Crumb at 7 PM. Audio trailer here.

- March 29 – Penn Contemporary Music presents violinist Maria Bachman and pianist Jon Klibonoff at Penn’s Amado Recital Hall in Irvine Auditorium, 34th and Spruce Street. Program includes Glass: Sonata No. 1; Paul Moravec: Three Pieces; George Rochberg: Sonata; and the first performance of a new work by Penn faculty composer Jay Reise, The Flight of the Red Sea Swallow. The Glass and Moravec works are Philadelphia premieres. The late George Rochberg was, of course, a long-time Penn faculty member, and he wrote his sonata for Bachman.

- April 12 – looking a little ahead, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra will perform Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony at the Kimmel Center, Christoph Eschenbach conducting, with Di Wu, piano and Thomas Bloch, ondes Martenot.

Last Monday evening, I had the great opportunity to go see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra perform at the Kimmel Center, with soloist and Curtis grad Hilary Hahn on violin.  The concert was great; I love seeing the energy and exuberant expertise of the Curtis students, and Hilary Hahn always plays with stunning accuracy and great thoughtfulness.  Hahn performed Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto (which won Higdon, a Philly resident, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music!)–I love the whimsical sounds that Higdon includes in the first movement, and the last movement is a flying fury of notes, which Hilary performed with virtuosic velocity.

The Curtis Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Mena, performed their own virtuosic pieces before and after the Higdon, beginning the concert with Hindemith’s Konzertmuzik for Strings and Brass and ending with the grand and irresistibly captivating roller-coaster of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.  (In my experience of playing music for groups of young kids, Shostakovich’s 5th, like Beethoven’s 5th, grips children immediately and MOVES them, literally.  Try playing the last movement for them and see if they can sit still through the raucous sounds!)

There were very few empty seats in Verizon Hall, and the crowd was young, old, in between–a wonderful mix of ages that we rarely see in symphony orchestra audiences.  Maybe the concert was a good Valentine’s date for the 20- and 30-somethings, or maybe the youth of the Curtis Symphony brought out the younger audience.  Whatever it was, having many generations to look around at in the seats of the symphony hall fills me with energy and excitement.  Other concert-goers feel it, too, and I’m sure the performers feel it on stage–the excitement is contagious!

I was even party to a happy multi-generational group at Monday night’s concert: I’d been invited there by my first violin teacher and her husband.  I got to watch the concert and share reactions afterwards with the woman who knew me when I was 5 years old and trying to play Twinkle with a straight bow!  I feel so lucky to have reconnected with my first teacher, and I hope to be able to remain in contact with students of mine as they grow up and choose professions of their own, whether those professions are in music or not.  So, please, music teachers, take your students to concerts whenever possible!

“It kind of highlights her skills, her lyrical quality she has a beautiful tone. And she can play like a person with her hair on fire, I mean really, really fast,” said Higdon.

Higdon also says it’s filled with beautiful melodies and is very rhythmic:

“There’s some unusual sounds in this, I decided to have the percussionists at the back of the orchestra start the piece along with Hilary in the front and they’re using knitting needles to actually play on their instruments and it’s the coolest sound.”

The program is February 14th at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall beginning at 8 p.m. To find out more, go to curtis.edu.

Listen to extended interview…

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Reported By Lynne Adkins, KYW Newsradio.