Palm Beach Symphony's Season Opens With Pianist Shelly Berg Next Month
The performance is at 3 p.m. on Sunday, November 9.
By: Stephi Wild Oct. 07, 2025
In a powerful launch to the season, American innovation meets Italian grandeur as Palm Beach Symphony's 2025-2026 Masterworks Series opens at 3 p.m. on Sunday, November 9 with pianist Shelly Berg and Music Director Gerard Schwarz leading the orchestra at Dreyfoos Hall in the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. This performance is generously sponsored by Patricia Lambrecht. Individual tickets to the Symphony's 2025-2026 Masterworks Series and Symphony Sessions: Lunch & Learns are now on sale.
A master of jazz and classical fusion, pianist Shelton “Shelly” Berg will perform one of George Gershwin's most iconic works, Rhapsody in Blue. This exhilarating season opener also features Gershwin's An American in Paris, the meditative beauty of Alan Hovhaness' Prelude and Quadruple Fugue and Ottorino Respighi's radiant Pines of Rome.
“This is a very exciting season because we are playing so much American music to celebrate our nation's 250thbirthday,” said Maestro Schwarz. “When you think about great American music, you think of Gershwin. He is known as a Broadway composer, and yet he is without question in the symphonic world, among the most popular and successful composers of symphonic repertoire. Even though he only wrote a handful of pieces, they beautifully blend jazz together with classical music.”
Berg is a Steinway piano artist and five-time Grammy Award-nominated arranger, orchestrator and producer. His newest album Alegría, released in July 2024, was recorded with bassist Carlitos Del Puerto and Dafnis Prieto. Berg's original song “At Last” was nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. Prior critically acclaimed albums include Gershwin Reimagined: An American in London, The Deep, The Nearness of You, Blackbird and The Will. Berg earned three Grammy nominations in the Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s) category with jazz singer-lyricist Lorraine Feather and international superstar Gloria Estefan, and a fourth Grammy nomination as co-producer of Gloria Estefan: The Standards. He earned his fifth Grammy nomination as co-arranger of “I Loves You Porgy / There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York” from the 2018 album Rendezvous featuring jazz singers Clint Holmes and Dee Dee Bridgewater with the Count Basie Orchestra.
“Shelly Berg is a remarkable artist on many, many levels,” Maestro Schwarz praised. “He's a great pianist, composer, arranger, educator and improvisor.”
Berg's other recent projects include arranging, orchestrating and co-producing the Estefan Family Christmas album, and recording and/or performing with Tony Bennett, Steve Miller, Seal, Lizz Wright, Andra Day, Monica Mancini, Kari Kirkland, Carmen Bradford, Chris Botti, Renée Fleming and Arturo Sandoval. He is also artistic director of The Jazz Cruise, artistic advisor for the Jazz Roots series at the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center in Miami-Dade County, and music director of The Barclay and Beyond Jazz Orchestra at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.
An award-winning educator with more than 40 years of leadership in higher education, Berg has served as Dean and Patricia L. Frost Professor of Music at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami since 2007 and announced he'll be stepping down from that position in Spring 2026. He was previously the McCoy/Sample Professor of Jazz Studies at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California and a past president of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE). In 2003, he was honored as Educator of the Year by the Los Angeles Jazz Society and in 2002 received the IAJE Lawrence Berk Leadership Award. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times named him one of three “Educators for the Millennium.”
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Boston-born Hovhaness' death, the second half of the concert will begin with his beautiful piece called Prelude and Quadruple Fugue. A “fugue” is like the orchestral version of singing a song in rounds. “It's taking a melody and having one instrument play and then the next instrument plays the melody, and the first instrument goes to play something else. And then, another person plays the melody and then they have two people playing something else and then a fourth person playing the melody and three people doing something else,” explained Maestro Schwarz. “It develops that way.”
To complete the program of solely 20th century compositions, Palm Beach Symphony will play Respighi's tone poem Pines of Rome. “Respighi is one of the greatest orchestrators. He wrote three tone poems about his impressions of Rome — The Fountains of Rome, Roman Festivals and The Pines of Rome,” said Maestro Schwarz. “In The Pines of Rome, you're going to hear birds chirping in the park. We'll create this sound with six extra brass players off-stage at the end of the piece who will make a tremendous racket.”
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