Mao Zedong and his lover Jiang Qing doing the foxtrot: This image transfixed John Adams while working on his opera “Nixon in China”. So he captured it in an orchestral piece, which the Japanese conductor Yutaka Sado will perform in his debut with the Konzerthausorchester. Organist Iveta Apkalna, soloist in Aaron Copland’s jazzy, modern Symphony for Organ and Orchestra from 1924, has already been with us for three seasons as “Organist in Residence”.

Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth, also known as “From the New World”, is a real classical hit whose slow movement is introduced so heartrendingly by the English horn. The Bohemian composer wrote it during a long stay in the USA. Its premiere in Carnegie Hall in 1893 brought the work enormous success, which has never diminished.