Free and open to the public

Miami University orchestra musicians curate this free concert honoring the life and memory of Daniel Pearl, the violin-playing Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered in 2002 in Pakistan.

The Daniel Pearl World Music Days acknowledge Pearl’s belief that music could bridge differences among people. In just five years, Daniel Pearl World Music Days has grown to include thousands of concerts and performances in over 60 countries.

The concert will feature Mozart’s Overture the Abduction from the Seragio, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess and will conclude with the exquisite Song of the Black Swan by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. This is an unusual performance because the version played by the Miami University Symphony Orchestra has a special orchestration by Andre Kostelanetz, the renowned Russian-American conductor and arranger. 

From the 1940s through the 1970s, Kostelanetz recorded scores of albums (as many as six per year) on 78s, 45s, and LPs for Columbia Records, selling well over 50 million copies over the course of his career. For fifteen years he conducted the New York Philharmonic in its post-season Promenade series at Lincoln Center and in Central Park, billed as “Andre Kostelanetz and His Orchestra.” The version we are performing was rescued from obscurity in Brazil by professor Thomas Garcia and given for this special presentation by the Miami University Symphony Orchestra under Ricardo Averbach.