**All single tickets for 2024-25 concerts go on sale SATURDAY, JULY 13! Subscription packages are available now at bpo.org/subscriptions.**

JoAnn Falletta, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin

STRAVINSKY  The Firebird Suite (1919)
DARON HAGEN  City of Light (World Premiere)
WIENIAWSKI  Violin Concerto No. 2

The Opening Night of our Classics Series promises an unparalleled musical journey, beginning with the mystical allure of Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite. The evening escalates to a celebration of virtuosity and innovation with the world premiere of City of Light by Daron Hagen, specially commissioned to commemorate JoAnn Falletta’s remarkable 25-year tenure with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The spotlight shines on Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated violinists of our time, as he returns to enchant with Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, performed on his legendary 300-year-old Stradivarius. This concert is not just a performance but a landmark event celebrating music, history, and the continued legacy of excellence at the BPO.

About City of Light

Commissioned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th year as music director, with the generous support of Scott Bieler, City of Light is a tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination, whether it be the hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of one “City of Light,” Buffalo, or the crackling synapses of an Einstein’s mind — the surging intellectual and philosophical power of secular humanist insights first ginned up in another “Ville-Lumière,” Enlightenment-era Paris, or the spiritual illumination suffusing the Sufi mystic Rumi the light that makes the shadows plain in Plato’s cave or the lightning that struck the key hanging from Benjamin Franklin’s kite — the spiritual essence of animism or the energy that powers the execution of the code sending ones and zeros back to us from the Voyager spacecraft — or the “subtle electric fire” that inspires our hearts to beat.