Sergei Rachmaninoff’s towering Piano Concerto No. 2 opens with pulsepounding passion, soothes you in the sentimental middle movement and sets you on the edge of your seat with its fiendishly difficult finale featuring the return of the sensational pianist Joyce Yang, a laureate of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya leads The Phoenix Symphony in Jesse Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone, a meditation for orchestra full of washes of colors and timbre, and in Antonin Dvořák’s cheery and lyrical Symphony No. 8, inspired by the Bohemian folk music of his native land.
