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Explore & Engage is a program designed to enrich your concert experience, connecting you with the music and musicians of the PSO. Throughout our website, look for the symbols below to learn more about Explore & Engage resources and activities planned for each of the BNY Mellon Grand Classics concerts.

CONCERT PRELUDES and POST-CONCERT EVENTS All BNY Mellon Grand Classics concerts feature a pre-concert talk, beginning one hour prior to the performance. These informative and engaging talks feature PSO staff conductors, special guest speakers and panel discussions directly related to the music you will hear on stage at Heinz Hall. Plus, stay after select Friday and Saturday BNY Mellon Grand Classics concerts and join us for informal chats with renowned guest artists and chamber music performances. Bring your questions and curiosities! THE LOBBY OF HEINZ HALL IS ALWAYS ACTIVE! Come early to browse exhibits and display boards throughout the hall. Other lobby events include interactive exhibits and sights & sounds from around the world that relate to the music being performed. During select BNY Mellon Grand Classics concerts, in-hall screens feature relevant concert information shortly before the performance begins, and conductors, composers and PSO musicians share musical insights from the stage. INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE? Our program books and website are great resources for information about your PSO, the music, composers and guest artists. Be sure to visit individual concert pages for sound clips, concert commentary, video podcasts with guest artists and more throughout the year.
EXPLORE & ENGAGE WORKSHOPS Led by teaching artist Christina Farrell How do you form a personal connection to a piece of music? Join us for our Explore and Engage Workshops to develop your audience skills of discovery, inquiry and reflection. Chart your own path to the heart of a specific musical selection through interactive exploration, and engage with others in a fun, welcoming environment. Workshops take place before and after select BNY Mellon Grand Classics Sunday performances listed below. These sessions are free and open to all ticket holders. �Pre-performance workshops begin one hour prior to the performance at the Dorothy Porter Simmons Regency Rooms. In an informal post-concert follow-up at the Overlook Room, relax, share your "a-ha" moments and pose any questions that remain. TO REGISTER: explore@pittsburghsymphony.org or 412.392.4876. Advance registration is required for pre-concert workshop only; availability is limited. Sunday, October 3, 2010 at 1:30 pm Symphonic Nuances of Passion: Strauss' Don Juan Ah, Love! No one embodies its rapture and pain more than the legendary lover, Don Juan. Explore how Strauss' symphonic poem illuminates the subtle nuances of passion and create your own amorous expressions inspired by the music. Sunday, October 31, 2010 at 1:30 pm A Mosaic of Motifs and Movement: Ravel's Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chlo� Connect to the colors and characters of ancient Greece! Identify musical motifs used by Ravel to portray impressions of a magical landscape. Explore variations on the themes through gesture and creative movement. Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 1:30 pm Simplicity and Chaos – The American Soundscape: Copland and Bernstein From bustling cities to rural landscapes, become an explorer of the American soundscape. Take a journey with the pioneers of American music to chart our country's open spaces and crowded corridors. Discover the sounds that speak to the simplicity and chaos of the American lifestyle. Sunday, January 30, 2011 at 1:30 pm The Audience's Ear – What do YOU hear? Mozart's Symphony No. 40, K. 550 Over the years there have been many conflicting reviews and interpretations of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 – but what do YOU hear? How does an audience listen anyway? Share your process and gain insight into others' thoughts through collective exploration and meaningful reflection. Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 1:30 pm Unveiling Exotic Textures: Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade Awaken your senses by unveiling the decorative and cultural traditions of the Near East. Discover how Rimsky-Korsakov used arabesque ornamentation to take the listener on an exotic journey and give voice to the legendary storyteller, Scheherazade. Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 1:30 pm The Poetry Within the Words: Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn Music is abundant in words! Listen between the words to hear how Mahler's symphonic colors and textures enrich the poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Consider what music can say that words can not and create your own language to reveal how the music speaks to you.
PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BOOK CLUB Join the PSO and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in an exploration of major themes from the 2010-11 season through books ranging from historical fiction to biography and popular science. Read the book and join WQED-FM's Jim Cunningham and PSO musicians in an evening of lively discussion! TO REGISTER: 412.622.3105 Advance registration is required. Availability is limited. Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 6:00pm A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument by Jasper Reese with William Caballero, horn Concerts on October 1-3 featuring mesmerizing horn solos in Strauss' Don Juan In the days before his fortieth birthday, London-based journalist Jasper Rees traded his pen for a French horn that had been gathering dust in the attic for more than twenty-two years and, on a lark, played it at the annual festival of the British Horn Society. Despite an embarrassingly poor performance, the experience inspired Rees to embark on a daunting, bizarre, and ultimately winning journey: to return to the festival in one year's time and play a Mozart concerto—solo—to a large paying audience. A Devil to Play is the true story of an unlikely midlife crisis spent conquering eighteen feet of wrapped brass tubing widely regarded as the most difficult instrument in the world to master—an endearing, inspiring tale of perseverance and achievement, relayed masterfully, one side-splittingly off-key note at a time. "High Fidelity meets Touching the Void in the improbably heroic adventure of an amateur French horn player who quite literally blows himself back into life again." --Bob Geldof, singer/activist www.ifoundmyhorn.co.uk Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:00pm Violin Dreams By Arnold Steinhardt with Mark Huggins, violin Concerts on October 29 and 31, 2010 featuring Sarah Chang in Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 Arnold Steinhardt, for forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. Steinhardt's story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the frankly sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the zanily charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach's Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers. Violin Dreams is studded with musical pilgrimages, one of them to the all but vanished Polish shtetl where his mother was born, and where, he shows movingly, his own love for the eerily evocative sound of the violin was born as well. "My heart soared while I read this book. I actually was moved both to laughter and tears. How can Arnold Steinhardt play the violin like an angel, and at the same time be such a hell of a writer? … His search in these pages for the violin of his dreams is an exciting, emotional adventure, but his finest instrument, and the one he plays best, may be the one inside of him: the soul of an artist." --Alan Alda, actor Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 6:00pm This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession By Daniel J. Levitin with Penny A. Brill, viola Concerts on December 3-5, 2010 featuring Verdi's Requiem In this groundbreaking union of art and science, neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music--its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it--and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals: � How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by drawing on the way our brains make sense of the world � Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac or U2 � That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise � How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our heads And, taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin argues that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. "Levitin is a deft and patient explainer of the basics for the non-scientist as well as the non-musician. . . . By tracing music's deep ties to memory, Levitin helps quantify some of music's magic without breaking its spell." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "Endlessly stimulating, a marvelous overview, and one which only a deeply musical neuroscientist could give. . . . An important book. " -- Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Musicophilia www.yourbrainonmusic.com Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 6:00pm Winter Fire By William R. Trotter with Paul Silver, viola Concerts on January 28 and 30, 2011 featuring Sibelius' Fifth Symphony William Trotter's critically acclaimed fictional debut explores the deep forests of Finland with Nazi intelligence officer Erich Ziegler, a gifted orchestra conductor swept up in the maelstrom of war. Laden with the magic of Norse legends, the savage power of the northern forests, and the horrors of the Finnish and Eastern fronts, this tale burns with the fuel of timeless music and an ancient civilization. Called upon to investigate the loyalties of the highly cultured Finns and keep them allied to the Nazi cause, Ziegler meets the famed composer Jean Sibelius. Obsessed by the genius of Sibelius's mysterious Eighth Symphony and bewitched by a beautiful servant named Kylliki, one act of defiance against his superiors lands Ziegler in the middle of the fire and ice of the Russian front. Exhibiting his outstanding knowledge of military battles, and his peerless mastery of place and the cadences of music, Trotter has written a timeless novel for historical fiction fans, military buffs, music lovers, and those fascinated by Norse mythology. Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 6:00pm Artists in Exile By Joseph Horowitz with Mikhail Istomin, cello and Joseph Horowitz, curator of Tchaikovsky Festival Concerts on February 4-6, 2011 as part of the Tchaikovsky Festival curated by Joseph Horowitz Decades of war and revolution in Europe forced an "intellectual migration" during the last century, relocating thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States. For many of Europe's premier performing artists, America proved to be a destination both strange and opportune. Featuring the stories of Anton�n Dvo?�k, George Balanchine, Kurt Weill, Otto Klemperer, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and many others, Artists in Exile explores the impact that these famous newcomers had on American culture, and that America had on them. "Heroically researched . . . chock-full of fascinating vignettes, stunning quotations, and shrewd insights on the fly." --New York Times Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 6:00 pm The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross with Hampton Mallory, cello Concerts on March 3-5, 2011 featuring works by Ravel and Stravinsky In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A Pulitzer Prize Finalist One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year "Comprehensive, imaginatively wrought, insightfully informative, and vastly entertaining." -- Jed Distler, Gramophone "In words that are beautiful, passionate, witty, and utterly compelling, Alex Ross has written a true rarity—a book about music that makes you want to run and listen to every note he talks about." -- Emanuel Ax, pianist Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 6:00pm Mahler (The Master Musicians Series) By Michael Kennedy with James Nova, trombone Concerts on May 13-14 and May 20-22, 2011 as part of the PSO's Mahler Cycle Michael Kennedy's classic biography is a great introduction to the works and personal history of Mahler. The author presents a vivid portrait of the composer's inspirations, influences and life experiences with an accessible discussion of his works. Drawing on new documentary evidence, Kennedy gives an authoritative account of Mahler's childhood and youth, his career as an opera conductor in Vienna and elsewhere, as well as the social background to his work as a composer. Part of the acclaimed Master Musicians Series, this is the perfect companion to the PSO's multi-year Mahler Cycle. Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 6:00pm Wild Harmonies By H�l�ne Grimaud with Robert Lauver, horn Concerts on May 13-14 featuring H�l�ne Grimaud in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 A gifted pianist from a young age, H�l�ne Grimaud made her first recording at the age of fifteen and won the French equivalent of a Grammy at sixteen. It wasn't until she met her first wolf that she discovered there was something missing in her life, leading her to establish a sanctuary for wolves in upstate New York. In a beautifully rendered personal story that weaves the tale of a musical prodigy's rise to stardom with one of an animal lover learning to communicate on a level as primal as music, Grimaud touches, astonishes, and delights with her remarkable insight and passion.