The Wartburg Community Symphony Orchestra will perform pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maurice Ravel and Modest Mussorgsky during its concert Sunday, Feb. 11, in Neumann Auditorium on the Wartburg College campus.

The 3 p.m. concert, “Transformation: Vaughan Williams, Ravel and Pictures,” will feature Wartburg alumna Jessica Nilles on piano and Erik Rohde, director of orchestras at Indiana State University, as the guest conductor and clinician. High school musicians participating in the college’s annual Meistersinger Honor Orchestra Festival will perform alongside the symphony.

Nilles will perform Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G.” The program also will include Vaughan Williams’ “Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus'” and Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

“The Vaughan Williams piece is a beautiful set of variations on a familiar English folk song, while the Ravel piano concerto is a virtuosic whirlwind for the piano soloist, full of fun, syncopated rhythms and thick harmonies clearly influenced by the American phenomenon of jazz, which was relatively new to Ravel at the time,” said Jacob Tews, Wartburg Community Symphony conductor.

“The Mussorgsky was originally written for solo piano, then later orchestrated by Ravel. The music-at times sparkling and colorful, at other moments dark and brooding-was inspired by a memorial exhibition of pieces of visual art by a recently deceased friend of Mussorgsky, taking us through a whole range of emotions before concluding with one of the great, awe-inspiring climactic movements in the orchestral literature.”

Tickets are available at www.wartburg.edu/symphony or at the door for $16.50 for adults and $6.50 for students. Children 5 years and younger are free. Wartburg College students are admitted free with their student IDs. For ticket information, call 319-352-8691 or 800-772-2085, ext 8691, or email wcs@wartburg.edu.