Julia Figueras: Welcome to Voices of Today, a podcast for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. I'm Julia Figueras. The story in ballet and classical music is legend. When Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring was premiered, a near riot ensued. The vitality of this landmark work has continued unabated since that infamous debut 110 years ago, albeit mostly in the concert halls these days. Garth Fagan Dance and the RPO are unveiling a new interpretation of The Rite of Spring. Garth Fagan Dance's new artistic director, P.J. Pennewell, and RPO Music Director Andreas Delfs join me to discuss this joint adventure. Congratulations on this very interesting project and thank you very much for being here today. Andreas, a bit of brief background. Stravinsky already had two successful ballets under his belt when The Rite of Spring was premiered, but the audience wasn't really prepared for what they saw, were they?

Andreas Delfs: No, I think you're referring to Firebird and Petrushka, which in terms of storytelling and especially musical language, are mild compared to what people encountered that fateful night in 1913, in Paris. I think it was, you know, sometimes in music we have quantum leaps. Take, for example, Beethoven between his second and third Symphony. It's a quantum leap, right? Or take Wagner between Tannhauser and Rheingold. Quantum leap. And for Stravinsky, I think it was this. I mean, I love Petrushka, which we've done last season, and Firebird, which we will do next season, but Sacre du Printemps, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Julia Figueras: It's a whole different kettle of fish, both orchestrally, which is what we're used to hearing in the concert halls. And it is, P.J., A very different kettle of fish in terms of ballet as well, isn't it?

P.J. Pennewell: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Andreas and I were talking about how interesting the change of meters and challenging the change of meters can be. I mean, just that alone is daunting for a dancer who loves to have a consistent–not necessarily all the time 4/4 timing–but a consistent meter, a consistent cadence throughout their piece. So they can kind of stop thinking about counting or thinking about the pulse. Andreas and I were talking about how in some of the sections, the meters can change two and three times within the course of 2 or 3 minutes. So that makes it very challenging for us to kind of keep a continuity going.

Julia Figueras: But beyond Stravinsky's description of the original ballet. But she said with knock kneed and long braided lolitas. Do we have any idea what the first ballet actually looked like?

P.J. Pennewell: I've seen a representation that was presented by the Joffrey. I think the Joffrey was the first company that tried to recreate as much of the original Nijinsky ballet as possible. I didn't really realize this, but I just found this out recently. There was no real documentation of the full ballet, so a lot of the reproduction had to do with images, photographs, and there clearly wasn't film back then. So a lot of it had to be researched historically. And so, I'm not really, I'm not really sure how it was done, but apparently it was successful. Clearly we had representations of the costuming. And then the movie Nijinsky did a good job of representing some of the sections that were, I guess, harder to count. I guess there were, there was a scene where we saw Nijinsky and the wings counting as the dancers were trying to keep track of, you know, their counts. 

Andreas Delfs: Yeah. The fun part of that is when Nijinsky was in the wings trying to yell, one, two three, one two three four five, one two three. Apparently, the noise in the audience that was so outraged by, I think, mostly the choreography and some by the music as well. The noise from the audience became so loud that Nijinsky's yelling from the wings could not be heard by the dancers. It must have been quite an evening.

Julia Figueras: One of the other issues with this was the actual subject matter, Andreas. Because it wasn't, well, why don't you give us a little summary of the original storyline. Of what The Rite of Spring was?

Andreas Delfs: Well, Julia, there is not much in you know, contrast to the ballets we mentioned earlier, Firebird and Petrushka, which are really complete stories that you could write down and read. And actually, Firebird is based on an old Russian fairy tale. There's nothing like that for Sacre de Printemps. It's very vague, and which is a wonderful thing because it gave choreographers so much leeway to do with it what they wanted. There are a couple of headlines not in the score, but in the piano score. This piece was first published as a two piano version. And the people who played it first in public was Stravinsky and Debussy. Can you imagine what that sounded like? So in the score for two pianos, there are headlines, and they say things like the young people greet spring with a crazy dance, and the young maiden is chosen to lead the old sage. And the chosen one dances herself to death. All in all, not more than I think 8 or 10 of those headings. And we know from talks with Diaghilev and Nijinsky and Stravinsky that it's supposed to portray pagan Russia, pagan rites in Russia, but it could be anywhere. It uses a lot of Russian folk music, but the pageantry and the pagan rites could have well been all over the world. It's primitive cultures celebrating the beginning of spring, which end in a... I don't want to say religious sacrifice, but in a sacrifice. At the end of that spring celebration, a young girl gets sacrificed, or rather sacrifices herself. That's all we know. So that's not much of a story you can do with a lot. And as you've seen, choreographers during the last 100 years did a lot with this. It gives them a lot of freedom to tell their story.

Julia Figueras: I was going to ask you, PJ, what are you going to do with that latitude?

P.J. Pennewell: I'll answer that, but since we're talking about the score, I did want to ask Andreas because I read something recently where Stravinsky kind of pushed back on the idea that there were specific Russian folk themes in the score. Did you–?

Andreas Delfs: He did, but he was proven wrong by musicologists later on. As a matter of fact, the famous bassoon solo at the beginning is taken from a collection that we know Stravinsky had in his library of Latvian and, I'm sorry, Lithuanian folk songs. The bassoon solo is, from a collection of Lithuanian folk songs and musicologists rather recently got hold of that book of 50 Lithuanian folk songs and a couple of other collections of Russian folk songs that other Russian composers like Rimsky-Korsakov used at the time. And I think there have been numerous songs and tunes identified that are part of Russian folklore. And Stravinsky did push back on that and said, well, yeah, maybe it was subconsciously somewhere that I heard it as a child or so.

Andreas Delfs: Whatever it is, it's authentic. And whether he took it from a volume of collected Russian folk music or whether it really it's very possible, you know, I have music in the back of my head. I have no idea where it comes from. And it could be nursery rhymes. It could be music we heard when we were five or 6 or 7 years old. But it is. It is a lot of traditional Russian folk music and Russian songs in that score.

Julia Figueras: So P.J. let's go back to that question. Lots of latitude. What are you doing with it?

P.J. Pennewell: Well you know, I've seen quite a few versions. Andreas and I talked about Pina Bausch's version. Who, Andreas has actually conducted that version before. It was… it was kind of rough. It was rough to decide on what the very first step was going to be based on who these people are. So I had to decide. I don't know much about Russian pagan rites or ritual, so I clearly wasn't going there. I had to see Paul Taylor's version to see how he, what his slant was, Graham has a version. So I decided that instead of making it a, it's still a spring ritual, but this collective of people are basically the healing clan society in this, this group of this, this society. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to show the process and the progress that a chosen one goes through to become the next healer or the next shaman in the society. So this ritual now becomes, we see this young woman who eventually emerges as the chosen one, become, go through her process of enlightenment. So at the, so what Andreas was referencing and we talked about it a little while ago, was the idea that this woman is not going to dance to the death. She's not going to do a sacrificial dance to the death. She's actually going to do a dance to enlightenment. So we're going to watch her transition from the initiate to one of the younger healers or seers.

Julia Figueras: So you choose to put a different twist on the end of the ballet than virtually anybody else has ever done with this ballet.

P.J. Pennewell: Yeah.

Julia Figueras: The timing of this project is really remarkable for you, especially PJ. It was just late November when it was announced that Garth would be stepping down, and you were named as the new artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance. So, this is your very first big work of, in your new position. And how does that feel?

P.J. Pennewell: Well, as you as you said when we first talked about doing the podcast Andreas, Julia said, so wow, Rite of Spring as your first your foray as the artistic director, that's going to be a heavy lift. So it is very much so a heavy lift. And of course, it wasn't planned. So it's kind of kismet that it all worked out the way it did. But I'm very excited. One because it is that really, it's probably going to be a seminal work that happened during this transition for myself in the company. But you know, this is an opportunity to just give a shameless plug to Andreas because Andreas and I talked a year ago, and as far as I'm concerned, the moment we came into the room and we just had a couple words together, I knew that I was in love with this guy. Because Andreas sees the project as a way to actually take the art form forward and to make it a presentation that is not just the idea that we're going to the theater to listen to the orchestra, to listen to a symphony, or we're just going to the theater to see dance, he really wanted it to be a collaborative endeavor.

P.J. Pennewell: And there's going to be some elements that go beyond what is the normal viewing experience. When you do see ballet and the symphony and we're going to leave that as a secret, and it's a nice little nugget that you'll experience when you come to see the show. But just the idea that Andreas was like, we got to do something different. This can't just be the typical experience, the viewing experience. We have to, this is an opportunity for us to really make a statement. And since the piece is about making a statement, which it did 110 years ago, Andreas said there's no reason why we have to now keep it in the museum of how these things are done. Let's just do something very different. So that gave me an enormous amount of inspiration to actually have even more latitude in terms of the creative process. 

Julia Figueras: You do have three basic audiences who will be there. We are going to have see, those of us who are familiar with both the RPO and Garth Fagan dance and have attended, you will have Garth Fagan dance fans who have never attended the RPO. You will have RPO fans who have never seen Garth Fagan dance. So you're going to be wedding these people. How do you push the envelope without alienating your core audiences, starting with you, Andreas?

Andreas Delfs: Well part of the answer to that question PJ just gave you. We were early on deciding that we didn't want your typical performance of a ballet where, for example, the orchestra would be invisible in the pit and the dancers would be in beautiful costumes and the beautiful scenery on stage. We wanted to do something where both visually and acoustically the orchestra and the dancers are on eye level. So the orchestra on stage and the dancers on stage in a configuration that makes you see the movement of the dancers and the movement of the musicians as well. You know, I'm always intrigued when I work with choreographers, which I love, my early career was spent with some of the greatest dancers and choreographers in Europe. We're basically doing the same, but in opposite directions. You know, I use my movement to guide and shape the music in front of me, and PJ uses the music in front of him, or rather, coming out of his speakers to shape and guide the movement of the dancers, you know, so it's music guides movement versus movement guides music. And I find that always very intriguing when I work with choreographers. And that's kind of what we want to bring out, you know, we want to, PJ just said we don't want to give it away, but we want to have some kind of interaction between the musicians and the dancers to show that our art forms are intensely related.

Julia Figueras: PJ, what about you? Pushing that envelope without pushing people away?

P.J. Pennewell: Well you know, it's, you can. So I could concentrate on that. See, the thing is, is once I got the okay or once I got the idea that Andreas and I were on the same page, and he kind of spurred on a certain spark. I had to then just leave it alone. I mean, intellectually, I get it. I get that there's going to be a melding of three different, you know, sects in the community. But once I understood that, I had to just kind of leave it alone. And I had to say, okay, if I worry about that, then I'm going to start choreographing so that the Fagan people can have something to appreciate, or I'm going to really make sure that it's musical so that the symphony goers will have something to appreciate. And then I was like, no, I can't do that. I just have to stay true to where I think I want to go with this and acknowledge, of course, who is going to be there, but ultimately this project's either going to be a success or it's not. And so, you know, if I kind of concentrate on that, that might sort of curtail some of the maybe more innovative things in my mind that I might want to try, but yeah, there's that danger of because this is now probably going to be the 20th version of it. To make it unusual. There's a possibility of Pit-falling into making it too esoteric, but then you also don't want to, you know, swing back to the other side and make it too obviously palatable. So to try and figure that out, I had to just say, I can't worry about who's coming. I just have to, you know as long as Garth is pleased, as long as Andreas is pleased, then I feel comfortable that whoever shows up will ultimately appreciate the experience.

Julia Figueras: This is a piece of music that is fraught with beautiful melodies and with a little bit of danger as well. What is it about this piece, Andreas, that has for 110 years, captivated the audience so thoroughly?

Andreas Delfs: Well, I think it's the prominence of the element of rhythm. Absolutely. I mean, rhythm is in all of Stravinsky's scores, but the rhythm that he uses is so, how shall I say, primitive is not the right word, but, you know, it's, whenever I do this piece, I think of the dawn of the earth and the dawn of mankind. And I often think like, what were the first sounds people made or that was audible on our planet before we called it music, you know, and you very quickly come to. Well, maybe the first melodies that were there was birdsong. Right. Sounds of nature. Thunder, rain patter, rhythm, but definitely birdsong. And that's definitely why Stravinsky starts this piece with the bird concerto, very much like Ravel does in Daphnis and Chloe, which is the first piece of our program, also Bird Concerto. And then soon after the bird concerto has been going on for a few minutes, you hear a very, [Imitation of the severe string motif that starts the 2nd episode: Auguries of Spring] Bum Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, you know. 

Andreas Delfs: Then accents come in and the rhythm gets a little distorted. So but it's primitive man, quote un-quote, thumping on a tree trunk or even, you know, as many choreographers do, just stomping their feet on the ground and unforgettable Pina Bausch on, on the stage was all filled with earth, and the half naked people were just stamping their feet onto the earth. It's very Neanderthal, you know, very primitive man. And he plays on that with so much joy. I think that electrifying primitivism that then becomes very sophisticated. I mean, some of the rhythms that are derived from that beginning are incredibly complex. And PJ said the change 2 or 3 times within two minutes. I'm sorry, it's like change 2 or 3 times every 10 seconds you know, there's a section, The meter changes every single bar, and so it has a lot to do. Peter and I talked about that. Why is this always, no matter whether you do it as a choreographed piece with dancers or as a concert piece, it's so alive and so electrifying. And I think panic is a very important element of that. All these rhythms Stravinsky could have written much easier. He could have written 4/4 and accents in the, you know, syncopations and so forth. But he chose to write 2/16, 5/8, 3/16, 11/4. Everybody who is involved in a performance of Sacre is at the verge of panic. Will this fall apart? Or can we actually reach the end of the piece without a major accident? And that kind of heightened stage of excitement that is close to the border of panic. Every time you do Sacre that is there and everybody feels it. Every dancer, every instrumentalist feels it. And I think the audience feels that vibe coming from the stage more than in any other piece of music that I know.

Julia Figueras: I think you're absolutely right. There's a distinct sense of danger for those of us who are sitting in the audience and, you know, and there's always that group of people that are hoping for failure if you know, they're always scared.

Andreas Delfs: One of my favorite quotes, Julia, is a great Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the champion of old music, who once said "Everything artistically exceptional always happens at the borderline to catastrophe". I love that.

Julia Figueras: So we have a piece on the borderline of catastrophe. PJ, when you choreograph a piece, what are your first steps to choreograph?

P.J. Pennewell: So we have two two-hour classes a day. The first half hour of the class we’re on the floor. We're stretching, we're lengthening. The next half hour we're actually standing and we're working on connective tissue. And this is all to kind of put the technique in your body so that it then can become second nature. The last part of class is we're actually doing what we call progression. So we're dancing across the floor and utilizing all of that stuff that we just went through for the first hour. What I started doing probably 13 years ago is I started to record these progressions across the floor. They could just be 6 or 7 bars of dance. That they just repeat back and forth, and then we'll change to another set of different types of progressions. And what I found I started doing was whenever I needed to start choreographing, I would just pull out 2 or 3 of those sections of the progressions that I had recorded, and just try to put them together to create a kind of choreography.

P.J. Pennewell: And the challenge is to make movement that you do in class become a choreography, because classroom music is not choreography. When you're practicing your scales, that's not what you're going to be doing in the symphony. So with Rite of Spring, that's how it, that's all I did. I just used some of the movements that I did in class. The importance of using movement in class that I use in class is the fact that we've been practicing it. So there's not really a lot of time that's needed to actually learn these movements. It's already in the dancer's bodies. The challenge then becomes rhythmically, now, what are we going to do when you use this music that we, this movement that we use classroom music to? How are then now are we going to keep the same rhythmic structure when we're using different music that could be slower or faster or brighter or softer? And so that's usually what happens. But when that usually happens, the music that we're using for the choreography has a consistent meter.

P.J. Pennewell: So the Rite of Spring then became a real incredible challenge for the dancers because there are sections where we have taken some of those classroom movements, and I want them to maintain that, that rhythmic structure over or under what Stravinsky is doing or what Andreas is having the the orchestra do. What it's going to look like when it brings together. You know, I have to explain to the dancers that Andreas is going to do the best he can to adhere to the recorded score that, you know, he signed off on.

P.J. Pennewell: But it's live. It's a live experience. There's going to be some sections where, you know, Andreas is going to be feeling that it has to just go a little bit slower. So you need to be cognizant and sensitive to the fact that that is going to happen and don't fall apart because, oh, God, the you know, that's not the rhythm that we that's not the cadence. That's not the tempo that we initially, you know, considered. Nothing about this production is going to be predictable. And that's what's really super exciting about it.

Julia Figueras: I'm curious to know which recording Andreas, you signed off on and why you chose that one.

Andreas Delfs: It's Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, which is my normal go to conductor in orchestra, partly because, when he was music director of that orchestra, got the most beautiful sounds out of any orchestra in the world, I think, and also because he is a very, which not many people know, he's a very rhythm oriented conductor. Everybody thinks always Karajan is beautiful, smooth sounds, but rhythm is a very, very important backbone to all of his interpretations. So when he unfortunately didn't record much 20th century repertory, he's firmly grounded in the Beethoven Brahms world. But when you listen to the recordings he did make out of Stravinsky and Prokofiev and Schoenberg and Bach, they're all exemplary. Well done. They're wonderful. They're reference recording, as I call them. And I just took the time, which I'd never done before, to compare his tempi to the ones that are in the score and are authentic Stravinsky tempi. We know that because, as I said earlier, he used to play it at the piano quite a bit with his buddy Claude Debussy. And the metronome marks were correct. And, and Karajan is almost always right on the bottom, exactly at the metronome that we know from Stravinsky. So I thought that was a good choice. And as PJ said, there will be adjustments, and it's not so much the tempi. It's like when you have a choice, for example, in an accelerando speeding up or rallentando slowing down or fermata, that's arbitrary, you know? And PJ already told me, for example, in this, in that section, he might need a little bit longer, like a pause between this note and that note that we can easily add like a comma. That's why I will go to a rehearsal before we start working with the orchestra. So I know if there are moments that the dancers might need a little extra time, or maybe even see a huge upbeat from me so they know the next section comes in. Whatever it is, we're going to work that out. That's the nice thing between working of conductor and choreographer together.

Julia Figueras: PJ, Andreas has a score and he can work from that score. What kind of documentation, notations, do you make for your choreography so that Garth Fagan dance or another dance troupe years from now can replicate your artistry?

P.J. Pennewell: Well, we record it. The thing with the recording is it's a two dimensional representation. So you are losing some of the nuance. So whenever we do use recording as a blueprint, we make it clear that this is a blueprint. And it's a living experience. So, you know, this happens quite often where we'll want to revive one of Garth's pieces. And we're going to have to use a video because some of the other dancers aren't around to show their parts. So we have to make it clear to the dancers that this is the blueprint. And Natalie and I are, once the blueprint is set, Natalie and I are going to sit back and watch it, and then we're going to fine tune it, and to fine tune it,

P.J. Pennewell: Fine tuning can be either, you need to, you really, I know on the tape it looks like you were center stage, but you're actually two feet right of center. And it can also be, you know, the dancer that did that might not necessarily be able to do what you can do now, or you might not be able to do what that dancer could do. So we're going to maintain the integrity of what that track is, but we're going to make sure that it becomes you. So you're not just parodying what you saw in the video. You're going to maintain a certain level of the original experience, but we're going to make sure that it then becomes you. So it looks like it's really you coming into the piece as opposed to you're just recreating the piece. 

Julia Figueras: So where do you know that blueprint is set when as you are choreographing a piece, do you go back and say, fix that? Or when do you know to walk away?

P.J. Pennewell: Yeah. So there's two answers to that question. The first is, you know, it's done. You know, when you can say that this will be the blueprint pretty much historically for us when it's been performed and when Garth says, okay, that is the performance that we want to use as the blueprint. But then when you walk away is a tough one for us because, you know, and I'm coming from the Fagan school because Garth will create a piece and he'll, and we'll believe that it's pretty much set. And then he'll come back to it two years later and we'll be doing what we did 10 years later, and we'll be doing what we did ten years earlier. And he's like, no, wait a minute. I need that to be over there. And we're like, yeah, but Garth, you know, it was here first. And he's like, yeah, I know. But now I want it over there a little bit. So it's never really, truly written in stone. There's the blueprint is there. But there's always, you know, you go back and you look at your work, you know, from four years ago and you're like, oh my God, how the heck did I... What was I thinking when I did that? Let me change this. Let me alter this a little bit because now as an older person, I feel like what I really want to say is this, as opposed to what I was saying four years ago.

Julia Figueras: Parallel question for you, Andreas. You have performed this piece any number of times. When you go back and look at the score, how much do you change from performance to performance, year to year? Are you clearly playing this differently than you would have conducted it ten years ago?

Andreas Delfs: Yeah, certainly. I mean, just like P.J. just said, the work is never done. And whether it's a Beethoven symphony or Sacre du Printemps, you always try to start from scratch again to have the approach. You do this for the first time and approach the score with the same sense of wonder. Now, with the ballet and working with dancers, certain things need to be worked out between the two parties, and that's tempi. I mean, you don't want to do, when you do a ballet in repertory like I did many years, you know, night after night after night. And you do different tempi every time the dancers go crazy. And they really don't like that. Right. But for example, in a piece like Sacre du Printemps, whereas the rhythms and the tempi are kind of fixed within a certain margin, what is not fixed and what's different for me every time is the, what I call the big picture. You know, this is a searing red hot piece. And if you play every single part searing red hot, it's overwhelming. You have to make a decision. Okay, in this passage, I relax a little bit with my movements and let the musicians relax a little bit.

Andreas Delfs: And here I really challenge them to play this sforzati. And the short note as powerful and brutally as they can. And in the next section I really try to make a transition to the, you know, the big arch from the first note of the piece to the last note of the piece. That is something that one has to keep in mind that the pacing, for lack of a better word, and that it's nothing to do with the tempi or the notated rhythm that has to do something with your vision of how the piece should come out as a whole. And that is different every single time, because sometimes I take my inspiration from the opening bassoon solo, and I think this is really the spark that I have to keep that in mind. When I look at the end of the piece, sometimes I find the bird concerto at the beginning, the moment that really sets the stage. And I just read today that, by the way there was no dancing until that rhythm. [Same imitated string motif] Bum bum bum bum bum bum.

Andreas Delfs: So the first three minutes curtain closed in the original production, and then they started dancing with that driving rhythm. So it kind of sets the stage. And sometimes I think of that when I start the performance, and I think this is where I'm going to take my jumping off point. But that's the joy and the difficulty of being a collaborative artist, because, you know, you have to make sure that these visions of the whole, you know, the whole big arch of the performance, that they are in sync.

Julia Figueras: PJ, how self-critical are you?

P.J. Pennewell: Very. But I'm more mature about it now. In the beginning, when Garth said you're choreographing next year. And I was like what am I supposed to say? How am I going to choreograph on your stage? And it was like everything had to be just right. It had to be just in the right place. I saw the Nijinsky movie. So I, you know, I was, I wanted to make sure that I did not present like how Nijinsky presented as a choreographer. I didn't want to be this overpowering, but at the same time, I wanted to make sure that things, that the details were clear so that when I look back at it, I could say, okay, this is what I wanted. That was a mess. How did I even do that? But now I'm like, well, why would anybody want to try to do a new version of Sacre right now? I mean, what has, what hasn't been said yet? And who would want to do this with a group of people that haven't really performed with live musicians before? I'm not going to I'm not going to beat myself up.

P.J. Pennewell: I'm going to do the best I can do. You know, as I said earlier, Andreas is right there with me. You know, Andreas is going to come to the studio next Friday to take a look at it. And it's going to be what it's going to be. It is what it is. I believe in it. I think it's, I think it's going to be beautiful. And if it's not, I mean, if it doesn't go over well, then I'm just going to chalk it up to experience. I'm, you know, I'm just going to say, well, I guess I probably could have did this or I'm just going to live with it and say, let's just see how people respond to it ten, fifteen years from now. Because we all know that, we all know historically that has happened billions of times where Rite of Spring included, you know, people were like, what is what is all of this blah, blah, blah. And why are the dancers stomping their feet? And then, you know, a hundred years later, it is now a classic. So yeah, I'm super critical. I'm, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up. I'm sorry. I'm too old now.

Julia Figueras: Well, I believe that we may have a new classic on our hands. When your collaboration between Garth Fagan Dance and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra is unveiled. I want to thank you both for spending some time to talk about this wonderful collaboration with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It's been a delight. Many thanks to P.J. Pennewell, who is the new artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance and of course, the music director of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Andreas Delfs. I'm Julia Figueras, Voices of Today is a production of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

P.J. Pennewell: Thank you Andreas. Thank you Julia.

Andreas Delfs: See you soon.

P.J. Pennewell: Yes you will.

Andreas Delfs: Bye.

P.J. Pennewell: Bye bye.