BSR Classical Interludes, more in April 2025

Listening In! Cupid’s Bow
Friday, April 18, 6pm
Uptown Knauer Performing Arts Center/Univest Room, 226 North High Street, West Chester

This relatively new intimate series features some of the area’s finest early musicians, here in a cocktail-hour program of trio sonatas and duos by J.S. Bach, Nicola Matteis, Bononcini, and others. The ensemble for the pay-what-you-will concert includes Martin Davids and Karen Dekker (violins); Brandon Acker and Mark Rimple (guitar, theorbo, and archlute); and Heather Miller Lardin (bass viol). The ensemble also presents a family concert the following day at 4pm.

Delaware Symphony: Amado Conducts Stravinsky
Friday, April 18, 7:30pm
Grand Opera House/Copeland Hall, 818 North Market Street, Wilmington

Much-lauded DSO music director laureate David Amado returns to conduct an ode-to-spring concert that closes out the company’s 119th season. The evening—capping Amado’s decades-long association with the orchestra—will feature Toru Takamitsu’s mesmerizing Twill by Twilight (a tribute to Morton Feldman); an early Debussy work, Printemps, that celebrates spring’s awakening; and Igor Stravinsky’s elemental masterpiece The Rite of Spring.

Opera Philadelphia: Don Giovanni
Fridays, April 25 & May 2, 8pm
Sundays, April 27 & May 4, 2pm
Academy of Music, 240 South Broad Street, Philadelphia

Closing its current and very successful season, Opera Philadelphia stages a new production of this Mozart work, “a beloved opera about a despicable man”. Lorenzo Daponte’s libretto will be sung in the original Italian (with English supertitles) and features Timothy Murray in the title role. The ensemble will be conducted by Corrado Rovaris and directed by Alison Moritz. Full view seats are currently sold out, but $10 rush tickets will be sold two hours before each performance.

Marie Rader Concerts at Rowan: Chanticleer: Music of a Silent World
Saturday, April 26, 7:30pm
Rowan University/Pfleeger Concert Hall, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ

The concert, part of the Sound Planet Music Festival, centers around contemporary composer Majel Connery’s The Rivers Are Our Brothers, with each movement representing a part of the natural beauty of our world—mountains, forests, rocks, and rivers. Members of the legendary vocal ensemble Chanticleer will coach the Rowan choir, which will join that ensemble for a portion of the performance, and the composer will speak on Friday, April 25.

Longwood’s International Organ Day
Saturday, April 26, throughout the day
Longwood Gardens, 1001 Longwood Road, Kennett Square, PA

Longwood celebrates International Organ Day by featuring its famous 1930 Aeolian organ—10,010 pipes and 146 ranks—in demonstrations (11:30am, 2:30pm, 6:30pm, and 7:30pm) by organist Thomas Gaynor. Gaynor was a competitor in the 2013, 2016, and 2019 Longwood Gardens International Organ Competitions and won the Gold Medal and Audience Prize at the St. Albans International Organ Competition. He serves as assistant organist & choirmaster at Philadelphia’s Saint Mark’s Church and is an adjunct professor of organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. The event is free with Garden admission.

Featured image: David Amado, music director laureate at Delaware Symphony, conducts this weekend. (Photo by Delaware Symphony Orchestra/Moonloop Photography.)

Image description: Amado in a black formal jacket, head down, lifting a conductor baton in one hand, in a music hall.