On May 5, 1891, guest-of-honor Peter Tchaikovsky conducted one of his own pieces to celebrate the opening of a new concert hall in New York City.
More than 46,000 performances later, Carnegie Hall is still the place to perform, if you're a musician; or the place to listen, if you're a fan of music.
The New York Philharmonic performed more than 5,000 of those 46,000 concerts. To be fair, Carnegie Hall was their home until they moved to Lincoln Center in 1962.
Walter Damrosch is the individual with the most performances; he conducted there almost 850 times.
Hundreds of pieces had their premiere at Carnegie Hall, including premieres of pieces by Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Antonin Dvorak, Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, and many more.
Tomorrow night at 8:00 PM on Classical MPR, you can hear the National Youth Orchestra perform two famous pieces premiered at Carnegie Hall - Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto and Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story".
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