The New York Philharmonic returns for its second major UMS residency, this time with a focus on Leonard Bernstein, the celebrated New York Philharmonic music director and composer who was born 100 years ago.

The first concert of the weekend features the music of Gustav Mahler, also a music director of the New York Philharmonic (1909-11), whose music Bernstein championed and brought back into the symphonic canon. The concert is conducted by Jaap van Zweden, the music director designate of the New York Philharmonic who assumes the reins in 2018-19. The 2012 Musical America Conductor of the Year, van Zweden comes to the New York Philharmonic after a decade as music director of the Dallas Symphony.

The second concert of this weekend festival residency recreates one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, which were broadcast nationally on CBS during 1958-1972. While titled a “young people’s concert,” it will be appreciated and enjoyed by audiences of all ages.

DSO music director Leonard Slatkin leads the New York Philharmonic in the finale of the Bernstein Festival and Ann Arbor residency. Evoking the chanted Jewish prayer of mourning, Bernstein’s powerful “Kaddish” Symphony was written in 1963 and is dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated just weeks before the first performance. The program opens with Richard Strauss’s witty vignettes of the bumbling knight-errant Don Quixote, the work that introduced Leonard Bernstein to New York Philharmonic audiences when he famously filled in with only a few hours’ notice, and without rehearsal, for an ailing Bruno Walter.

The Sunday concert will also be broadcast live to communities in more than 20 counties in the northern part of Lower Michigan by Interlochen Public Radio and streamed online at interlochenpublicradio.org. Additionally, the concert will also be part of the syndicated radio concert series “The New York Philharmonic This Week” with a delayed broadcast nationally and internationally through the WFMT Radio Network. The broadcast will begin at 2 pm, and the pre-concert hour will be hosted by IPR’s Nancy Deneen and Mark Travis.

Numerous residency activities, including master classes, lectures,  and workshops, will occur throughout the weekend. Scroll below for full details.