"On a recent whitewater rafting trip, a fellow traveler asked if this experience on the River of No Return would affect my musical performances. The answer was an unequivocal yes. Why is this the case? How could I be so convinced? As a language without words, music communicates a commonality among people, linking mankind by means of shared experience. In classical music, the composer begins this wordless chain of communication by imagining sounds connected to his experiences and by writing them down. While the composer's hieroglyphics can give the performer much information about his intentions, the picture is incomplete if the performer merely executes what she sees before her. Understanding, relating to and expressing the feelings pregnant in the written page is the musician's mission and lifelong preoccupation. It is a process that changes constantly as her life unfolds; this explains why the listener enjoys hearing different performers interpret the same work or the same performer play it at different times of her life. As the composer provides us with a rich mine of emotions to uncover, so must we discover what is within ourselves in order to enrich our interpretation."

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Evangeline Benedetti has been a member of the New York Philharmonic since 1967, the first women in the cello section and one of the first women appointed to a permanent position with the orchestra. She has been featured in the chamber music pre-concerts at Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall. She has appeared frequently in the Philharmonic's Ensembles series, often with such guest artists as Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Jeffrey Kahane and Jerome Lowenthal, at such venues as Merkin Concert Hall and the 92nd Street Y in New York; and on tour at the Grand Teton Music Festival; the University of Wyoming, Converse College in Spartenburg, South Carolina, and the Tillis Center of Long Island University. She was appointed to the Philharmonic by Leonard Bernstien and has since appeared with the orchestra in more than 4,000 concerts in New York and around the globe.

Since making his first orchestral appearance with the Zagreb Radio Symphony Orchestra, pianist Pedja Muzijevic has distinguished himself as one of the most versatile of young artists. Praised for his interpretations of the standard literature and as a champion of contemporary music, he has toured extensively as soloist with orchestra and as recitalist across Europe, Great Briton, Canada, Japan and the United States.