Orchestral Ax-cellence

When: Sept. 20–22
Where: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Ave., Mpls., 612-371-5656

Headlining the Minnesota Orchestra’s season opener, Emanuel Ax returns to play Chopin’s luminescent Piano Concerto no. 2. Ax recently highlighted the work in his radio series, The Concertos According to Manny, with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Eric Friesen and offered an insight as to why the inner Adagio movement is so lovely: A twenty-year-old Chopin evidently wrote a friend that the piece had been inspired by tender feelings he had for a classmate at the Warsaw Conservatory, “whom I dream of.”

Starry eyes can turn to the starry skies with Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement work depicting the human and mythical qualities ascribed to our closest celestial neighbors—Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Holst didn’t include Pluto because it wasn’t discovered until two decades after he wrote his masterwork, but given the recent controversy over whether Pluto is a planet or just a “trans-Neptunian object,” maybe that’s just as well.