Daniela Candillari

Daniela Candillari is a conductor who appears with US orchestras and opera companies. In this appearance she leads the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in New Orleans in a program mixing Russian orchestral favorites with a French cello concerto, giving listeners a chance to hear her handle both large-scale color and a soloist-driven work.

This program moves through short, vivid pieces before settling into a full concerto. Tchaikovsky's Slavonic March opens with a somber melody drawn from Serbian folk song before building into a triumphant close, a piece that rewards a conductor who can shape a clear arc from darkness to brightness. The Saint-Saëns cello concerto, unusually, runs its movements together without pause, so listen for how the conductor keeps momentum between the soloist's lyrical and virtuosic passages. The Khachaturian waltz is a brief, swirling showpiece from a stage work about masked balls and mistaken identity. Prokofiev's Cinderella suite closes the evening with music that alternates between tenderness and sharp, angular humor, requiring quick shifts in character from the orchestra.