Our dynamic season opener begins by honoring the industrial history of our region, featuring Stacey Garrop’s Forging Steel, premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony and performed with a specially curated version of the 1992 Guggenheim film of Mill workers in the Cambria Iron Works Machine Shop. Next, we celebrate the role of technology and innovation in our region with Automation, a composition that places the cello soloist against an AI version of itself, blurring the lines of technology and human creativity. On the second half, we perform Rachmaninoff’s extraordinary Symphonic Dances, his final orchestral masterpiece, composed in America in 1940.