Fun Facts about Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO)
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RPO’s patron is HRH the former Prince of Wales (which really puts the “royal” in Royal Philharmonic)!
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In 1986, RPO was the first U.K. orchestra to launch its own record label: RPO Records and has since achieved well over 50 million streams of its recorded music each year.
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RPO Extra is a podcast performed and curated by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Northampton's John Griff offering insights into the people behind the music, information about upcoming concerts, and excerpts from the RPO's extensive back catalogue of recordings. Listen to their episode featuring RPO Music Director Vasily Petrenko.
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) returns to the Center for the Arts on January 28 with an exciting program featuring the acclaimed 2022/2023 RPO Artist-in-Residence pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, RPO Music Director Vasily Petrenko, and pieces by Debussy, Prokofiev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Cemented in its place at the forefront of classical music performance, RPO demonstrates an unwavering dedication to excellence while developing its programming, breaking down barriers, and making classical music accessible and inclusive.
Founded in 1946, RPO plays approximately 200 concerts around the world each year to a live and online audience of more than 60 million people. Since his placement as Music Director in 2021, Vasily Petrenko has only furthered the critical acclaim of RPO, which according to a 2023 bachtrack article, has elevated RPO into “an extremely stylish limousine, slipping almost imperceptibly through all the gears, but also powering along with maximum torque whenever required.”
Kicking off the afternoon is Debussy's sprightly colorful Danse (orchestration by Ravel), followed by Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 featuring British pianist Kanneh-Mason. “Calmly commanding [and] unfailingly subtle” (The New York Times), she is a rising star in music who has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, L.A. Philharmonic, National Arts Centre Orchestra Ottawa, and at the Barbican, Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore halls in London, and the Philharmonie Berlin. In addition to recording three albums—the first of which entered the 2019 UK classical charts at No. 1 with Gramophone magazine extolling it as “one of the most charming and engaging debuts”—she was a 2021/2022 ECHO Rising Star and recipient of the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award as well as an Opus Klassik award for Best Young Artist. For a preview of Kanneh-Mason in action, watch the video below of her performing Debussy from her latest album Childhood Tales:
The program concludes with Rimsky-Korsakov’s brilliant symphonic poem, Scheherazade, an exotic fantasy tale that uses every instrument of the orchestra to tell the story. Premiering in 1888 conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov himself, the composition finds inspiration from tales within The Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights).
This program is sponsored by the Tom and Evelyn Kiley Fund.