Reno Phil and Reno Chamber Orchestras Concert Previews

Published February 20, 2026

Reno Phil and Reno Chamber Orchestras Concert Previews

Area music lovers are in for a treat the next two weekends, as the Reno Phil and Reno Chamber Orchestras continue their seasons.

Reno Phil Stravinsky’s Firebird

February 21 and 22—both concerts at 4:00 p.m.

Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts

https://renophil.com/stravinskys-firebird

Our musical feast begins with a concert that is in many ways quite literally for the birds. Really! Opening with Jonathan Sokol’s What Trees May Speak, employing recorded birdsong as well as evocative, melodic writing for the instruments of the orchestra, this piece shines a light on the dwindling bird population in our world while inspiring listeners to consider and engage in conservation efforts.

The concert’s title takes its name from the second piece on the program, Stravinsky’s Firebird. Written originally in 1909-10 as music for the ballet presented by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Phil will be playing a suite of music for orchestra without dancers. Stravinsky extracted and arranged suites of music from the ballet at three different times over the years—in 1911, 1919, and 1945. The Phil will perform the 1919 rendition, which remains the most performed of the three suites today.

After intermission, the concert closes with one of the most beloved piano concertos in the repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s First. But the work didn’t start out as beloved. In 1874, when working on the composition, Tchaikovsky, who was not a pianist, asked “friend” Nicolai Rubinstein to come listen to him play through the work and offer some feedback. Rubenstein’s response began in cold silence and then erupted into a volcano of insult about how the piece was “vulgar”, “clumsy”, “unplayable”, and “badly written.” In a concert with a bird theme, I suppose one could say he gave Tchaikovsky’s piece the bird. The composer, figuratively, gave him back the bird by saying, “I shall not alter a single note. I shall publish the work exactly as it stands!” (*A couple years later, after some kinder feedback from a different pianist, Tchaikovsky did make some helpful tweaks to the score.)

Although written in Russia, the work received its world premiere in Boston, and it was very well received. Since then, the work has been among the most played concertos. During the heart of the Cold War, a young man from Texas, Van Cliburn, stunned the world by going to Moscow and winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Later that year he recorded the Tchaikovsky First Concerto and a few years later it became the first classical recording in history to go Platinum. For this weekend’s performances, Reno is fortunate to have Jon Nakamatsu as soloist. Winner of the Van Cliburn Competition in 1997 (yes, this competition was founded by the same Van Cliburn), Mr. Nakamatsu has a close relationship with Reno and the Phil and appears here regularly. Several years ago, he traveled with the leadership team from the Reno Phil to Steinway Headquarters in New York to help them select the piano that the Phil purchased. He will perform on that instrument this week. Lots of full circles here.

Mr. Nakamatsu is a remarkable artist and person. One place this is demonstrated is in his legendary 2007 “Loser’s Club” speech. Do yourself a favor and take 10 minutes to watch here:

The Cliburn

Jon Nakamatsu's "Loser's Club"

Jon Nakamatsu's, 1997 Cliburn Competition Gold Medalist, addresses the audience during the awards ceremony prior to announcing the finalists of the fifth International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. Footage provided by Viktors Berstis

Reno Chamber Orchestra Barber: American Voices

February 28 (7:30 p.m.) and March 1 (2:00 p.m.)

Nightingale Concert Hall

https://www.renochamberorchestra.org/2526-season

The Reno Chamber Orchestra continues its exploration of American musical perspectives with its Barber: American Voices concert. RCO music director Kelly Kuo has assembled a program that looks backwards and forwards in our country’s history. These performances open with Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3 “The Camp Meeting.” Ives is one of the most interesting and important American composers. Completely original and modernist, his music often combines different themes and popular tunes, often at the same time. This can simultaneously cause both a jarring cacophony as well as a fascinating and rewarding new perspective. It is completely original. Composed at nearly the exact time Stravinsky was writing his Firebird, Ives’ 3rd Symphony, and penned for the smaller forces of a chamber orchestra, it melds Civil War songs, dances, and themes from Western classical music to evoke a nostalgic setting of his fond childhood memories. A miracle of Ives’ music is that, even a century later, it sounds at once ultra-modern and of a long-gone era.

Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 has become a treasured staple of the chamber orchestra repertoire, and not unlike the Ives, is a stunning and nostalgic look back. Setting a text by author James Agee, Barber skillfully and artistically walks the listener through a young child’s view of a long-gone summer night. Lauded lyric soprano Jacqueline Echols joins Maestro Kuo and the RCO for this powerful work.

From 1915 to 2025, Ms. Echols returns to the stage to sing the aria When they ask me to stand, will I? from the opera She Who Dared by the remarkably talented modern composer Jasmine Barnes. This powerful opera, commissioned by the American Lyric Theater (of which Kelly Kuo is associate artistic director) tells the story of Rosa Parks and six other women crucial to the Civil Rights Movement. Here is a video of Ms. Echols, Maestro Kuo, and ensemble performing the aria at the piece’s birth last summer.

The next piece on the program, I Have Seen the Future by Matt Browne, offers a fascinating perspective. Inspired by how past generations predict what things might be like in the future, this fascinating piece might be called Nostalgic Futurism… if such a term existed.

Douglass Moore’s Farm Journal closes the concert. A work from 1947, this final “voice” projects a purely American viewpoint but without engaging in familiar sonic clichés and familiarities that one might expect from such a work from this time and place. From the program note to the CRI recording of the work:

Douglas Moore's Farm Journal here recorded is a piece of music that could only have been written by an American, its color and idiom are intensely of this continent, though the composer resorts to none of the typical phraseologies of standard ‘Americana.’

Perhaps it’s just my last name, but this Reno Chamber Orchestra concert program, with its combination of American nostalgia, history, modernism, and futurism brings to mind the quotation by author William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”

Fortunately, as I write this, these concerts by the Reno Phil and the Reno Chamber Orchestra are not in the past. They are February 28 and March 1, and we hope you will choose to come share this music with us.

Scott Faulkner is principal bassist of the Reno Phil and the Reno Chamber Orchestra. For the League of American Orchestras, he is director of its Alumni Network and faculty director of its Essentials of Orchestra Management program.