Miho Hazama and m_unit

Miho Hazama and m_unit

Saturday | March 16 | 8pm

Berklee Performance Center

Grammy-nominated composer and conductor Miho Hazama is one of the most promising and talented composers/arrangers of her generation. Lauded in DownBeat as one of “25 for the Future,” Hazama creates inventive, complex, and surprising compositions for m_unit, the 13-piece jazz chamber orchestra that she leads.

“Hazama’s boldly organic and singularly exciting collective is a breath of fresh air. Her uncanny ability to remain intellectually stimulating and vibrantly spirited is what makes her work singularly innovative.”

–All About Jazz

Orchestre de Paris

Klaus Mäkelä music director and chief conductor

Yunchan Lim piano

Sunday | March 17 | 7pm

Two young superstars lead the way when the Orchestre de Paris makes a return to Celebrity Series for the first time since March 1994 with three important pieces that were all premiered in the City of Light.

Conductor Klaus Mäkelä, just twenty-eight, already has a major career, with appointments in Paris and Oslo, and an artistic advisor role at Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.

Yunchan Lim, who in 2022 became the youngest pianist to win the Cliburn Competition, takes the soloist part for Prokofiev’s breathtaking, fiendishly difficult Second Piano Concerto.

Debussy’s tone poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune opens the performance with a beautifully drawn moment of lightness, ease, and color. Stravinsky’s thrilling Firebird, heard in its complete version, brings this performance to a jaw-dropping close.

Program:

Claude Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2

Igor Stravinsky The Firebird