Terry Teachout writes about literature and the arts for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among many other publications. The Washington Post described his biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, as "a balanced, judicious assessment, flecked with sharply critical insights." Drawing on several previously unavailable sources, including hundreds of hours of backstage recordings, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong offers new insight into the life of the legendary jazz musician.

Julie Powell, tired of working dead-end jobs, decided to try something new. What she started was a year-long odyssey cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogging about it.The resultant book, Julie and Julia, spent weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list, earned a 2006 Quill Award, and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep. Her new book, Cleaving, chronicles a new chapter in Powell's personal life and offers another facet of her fascination with food and a new fixation: butchery. Described as "hilarious and ferociously articulate" by Entertainment Weekly, Powell brings a fresh new voice to the art of biography and cooking.

Ray Chen is the top 2009 medal winner of the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition of Belgium, and also won the Young Concert Artists Auditions in 2009.

Curtis marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the school’s most celebrated alumni, Samuel Barber (’34). Included are the world premiere of an unfinished violin sonata complemented by movements  by Curtis-connected composers, and Summer Music and Dover Beach, among other vocal and chamber works.

An American filmmaker who revolutionized the documentary film genre, Ken Burns is the award-winning creator of the documentary series Baseball, Jazz, and Unforgivable Blackness. His landmark film, The Civil War, was the highest-rated series in public television history, boasting an audience of 40 million viewers when it first aired and going on to win more than 40 prizes, including two Emmy and two Grammy awards. Airing this fall on public television, Burns’s new work, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, tells the story of the creation and evolution of the National Parks System using archival photographs, first-person accounts, and some of the most breathtaking new images of our national parks ever captured on film. In his review of the companion book to the series, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes, “the book permits the eye and mind to linger over the truly breathtaking pictures in a more meditative way that film does not allow. The result is almost elegiac, producing the same kind of goose bumps that Burns created in his early work on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Civil War.”

One of televisions most outspoken and respected journalists Mika Brzezinski is an msnbc anchor and co-host of Morning Joe with Joe Scarborougha program Time magazine calls revolutionary and the New York Times ranked as the top news show of 2008. She also appears on NBC Nightly News and Weekend Today. Prior to joining NBC Brzezinski worked at CBS where she anchored CBS Evening News Weekend Edition and later became the networks principal Ground Zero reporter following the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. Her book All Things at Once is a motivational book geared toward helping women deal with the unique challenges they face in balancing personal life family life and career. Joe Scarborough is the host of Morning Joe. He served as a member of the United States Congress for seven years and is the author of The Last Best Hope which outlines a plan to guide conservatives back to a political majority after their defeats in the 2006 midterm and the 2008 Presidential elections. Along with Brzezinski Joe can be heard daily on the Joe Scarborough Show a syndicated talk-radio show on ABC Radio Networks.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation by dramatically increasing the power of the American president and redefining the government as a national security state.

A powerful voice for ecumenical understanding, Karen Armstrong is the author of many acclaimed books on religious affairs, including A History of God and The Battle for God. Recipient of the 2008 TED Prize, she has participated in the World Economic Forum, and is currently an ambassador for the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations. The Case for God examines the diminished impulse toward religion in modern society and the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality.

Evolutionary biologist and unapologetic atheist Richard Dawkins taught for many years at Oxford University as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. The Economist called his international bestseller, The God Delusion, "a particularly comprehensive case against religion." His other works include The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. A follow-up to The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth uses scientific evidence to argue the case for evolution.

Encore- The author of modern and authoritative historical narratives, New York Times bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick won the National Book Award in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Mayflower in 2007, and won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Revenge of the Whale. In The Last Stand, Philbrick evokes the history, geography, and haunting beauty of the Great Plains and tells one of the most iconic and misunderstood stories of the American West.

In a program highlighting music's connection to other art forms, Maestro Dutoit pairs Prokofiev's Shakespeare-inspired ballet music for Romeo and Juliet with a piece by the timeless French composer, Henri Dutilleux, that takes Vincent van Gogh's painting Starry Night as a point of departure. With its striking use of 12 cellos at the front of the stage, this remarkably effective piece is part of a season-long celebration of Dutilleux's music and builds on the tradition of Ravel and Debussy and their inspiration from French Impressionist painters. The soloist for Liszt's First Concerto is American pianist Jeremy Denk in his Philadelphia Orchestra subscription and Carnegie Hall orchestral debuts, whose playing has been described by the New York Times as "bracing, effortlessly virtuosic and utterly joyous." Winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, Denk has taken an unconventional route to the top of the piano world, through partnerships with prominent musicians, commissions from leading composers, and with a celebrated blog, Think Denk.

Montreal-born Yannick Nézet-Séguin makes his third Philadelphia Orchestra subscription appearance with milestone symphonies by two Viennese masters working a century apart. Haydn's "Military," so named because of its trumpet-and-drum fanfare in the second movement, finds apt foil in Mahler's mighty Fifth, whose march-like first movement is said to echo the composer's childhood memories of bugle calls and military bands in his native Moravia. Currently principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic, Nézet-Séguin is winner of a 2009 Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist of the Year Award. At his 2009 appearance with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philadelphia Inquirer praised his "coloristically astute, emotionally anchored performance," and wrote that he "became the hero of his own concert by ceding the spotlight to all around him, making them look terrific." 

Spanish-born conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos joins forces with Greek-born violin virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos for one of the most revered concertos in the repertoire. Kavakos, who recently toured Europe with The Philadelphia Orchestra and former Music Director Christoph Eschenbach, has been dubbed "The Violinist of Violinists" by the Strad. Frühbeck, artistic director of the Dresden Philharmonic, has been a favorite locally since his sensational American debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1969. He sets the Tchaikovsky Concerto against the Overture to Mikhail Glinka's bubbling nationalistic opera Ruslan and Lyudmila and Bartók's virtuosic Concerto for Orchestra from 1945, a piece whose assertive brilliance and orchestral mastery reveal little of the composer's tragic poverty and illness during the last months of his life.

LIVE - Robert McCrum is the associate editor of The Observer (London) and co-author of the bestseller The Story of English, a history of the English language, that went on to be adapted into an Emmy Award-winning nine-part PBS television series. He is the author of six works of fiction, including In the Secret State and Mainland. Among his nonfiction books are the acclaimed biography Wodehouse: A Life and the memoir My Year Off: Recovering Life after a Stroke.  In Globish, McCrum argues, “that a seismic shift in the foundations of our lingua franca has transformed [British and American English] from an expression of Anglo-American cultural sovereignty into a supra-national phenomenon, with its own powerful inner dynamic.”

Encore- Hampton Sides is an acclaimed bestselling author and a National Magazine Award nominated journalist.  He won the PEN USA Award for nonfiction and the 2002 Discover Award from Barnes and Noble for Ghost Soldiers, a historical narrative following the rescue of WWII Bataan Death March survivors that was later adapted into the Miramax feature film The Great Raid. His next book, Blood and Thunder, was adapted into an episode of the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Experience series. Hellhound On His Trail, is a taut and thrilling account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 65-day manhunt for his killer, the longest in American history.

Thomas Buergenthal was 10 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. He is now the American judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  A Lucky Child is his memoir of his remarkable journey from prisoner to protector.

A look into the lives of John and Abigail Adams from eminent historian Joseph J. Ellis, the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Sphinx and Founding Brothers.

Must You Go? is Lady Antonia Fraser’s passionate memoir of her marriage to renowned Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Harold Pinter. Fraser has also authored critically acclaimed biographies of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette.

From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Enchantress of Florence comes the fantastical tale of 12-year-old Luka’s magical quest to save his father.

Renowned food journalist (“The Minimalist”) and author of the James Beard Award and IACP/Julia Child Award-winning cookbook, How to Cook Everything, offers recipes that are healthy for you and the environment.

Director of the Institute for Public Service at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, David Eisenhower is the grandson of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower and the namesake of presidential retreat Camp David. His New York Times bestselling book, Eisenhower at War: 1943-1945, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Going Home to Glory is Eisenhower’s fond account of his grandfather during his retirement and the memories they shared at his home in Gettysburg, PA.