Violinist Lin will play with BR Symphony

The Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra will open its 2012-13 Investar Bank Masterworks Series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in the Baton Rouge River Center Theatre for the Performing Arts, 275 St. Louis St.

The orchestra, under the direction of Timothy Muffitt, opens its 64th season with rhythmic propulsions in “Millennium Canons” by recent Pulitzer Prize-winning modern composer Kevin Puts, along with violinist Cho-Liang Lin performing Tchaikovsky’s “Violin Concerto in D major.”

The concerto is said to be the most popular concerto in literature, declared to contain passages almost impossible to play.

Muffitt and the orchestra will complete the evening with a piece that contains one of the most spine-chilling introductions in classical music, Johannes Brahms’ “Symphony No. 1 in C minor.”

Lin is lauded the world over for the eloquence of his playing and for the superb musicianship that marks his performances. In a concert career spanning the globe for 30 years, he is equally at home with orchestra, in recital and playing chamber music as he is in teaching in a studio.

Lin has performed worldwide, and as director of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest since 2001, he has helped develop a festival that once primarily focused on chamber music into a multidiscipline festival, featuring dance, jazz and a burgeoning new music program.

Lin was born in Taiwan in 1960 and began violin lessons at age 5 and studied in Sydney, Australia, at age 12. Inspired by an encounter with Izhak Perlman while in Sydney, Lin traveled to New York in 1975 to audition for Perlman’s teacher, the late Dorothy DeLay, at the Juilliard School. He studied six years with her and made his New York debut at age 19 at the Mostly Mozart Festival.

In 2000, Musical America named Lin its Instrumentalist of the Year. He was invited to join the Juilliard School faculty in 1991 and later was appointed professor of violin at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston. Lin plays the 1715 “Titian” Stradivarius and has made several recordings.

Tickets are $25-$55. For tickets or more information, call (225) 383-0500 or visit http://www.brso.org.

Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra