The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra has already begun its 2025–26 season, which features an exciting lineup of iconic works and renowned guest artists across its Classics Series and Pops Series.
Up next will be internationally acclaimed violinist Gil Shaham, who will play Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto, written in 1910, and Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, written in 1934.
Coleridge-Taylor, a mixed-race composer from the U.K., wrote his Violin Concerto as a tribute to American violinist Maud Powell, a friend and colleague who was responsible for the violin transcriptions of his original piano works and was an advocate for his compositions in a genre that was not always welcoming to nonwhite composers.
Hindemith, from Germany, wrote Mathis der Maler as an orchestral work that he would later incorporate into an opera based on the life of painter Matthias Grünewald.
Also on the program—and under the baton of Music Director Eric Jacobsen—will be OPO’s performance of Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56a, and another short work, Dylan Hall’s Scherzo for Orchestra.
So you’ve never heard of Dylan Hall? You probably will, eventually. He’s just 17 years old and was a 2023 winner of the Orlando-based National Young Composers Challenge—a highly prestigious annual competition conceived by retired tech entrepreneur Steve Goldman in 2005 to encourage talented teenagers.
Over the past two decades the YCC has become arguably the nation’s most important incubator of next-generation, new-music creators. Since 2016, UCF has been a co-sponsor of the competition, which culminates with a “Composium” in Steinmetz Hall during which winning compositions are performed by OPO musicians—with the awestruck young composers present.
“The whole program is incredibly unique,” says Hall, who is a senior at Albany High School in Albany, California, and a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Precollege. “It’s also pretty scary because you’re sitting onstage while the musicians discuss and rehearse the music. And Scherzo for Orchestra was the first orchestral piece I’d ever written.”
Hall, who plays piano (among other instruments), says that his YCC experience validated his desire to pursue composing as a career. His entire family, he says, including his grandparents, will be present for the milestone performance in Orlando.
A “scherzo” (“joke” or “prank” in Italian) is a light, playful musical passage—sometimes scherzos are inserted into larger-scale works, such as symphonies—that gallops along not unlike the soundtrack of a cartoon from Looney Tunes. Hall’s exuberant work is, not surprisingly, fun to hear (and, presumably, fun to play).
Dr. Phillips Center is located at 445 South Magnolia Avenue, Orlando. For more information, call or visit the website.
