Carnegie Hall becomes part-laboratory, part-pep rally when seven orchestras -- and many of their fans -- arrive this month for the inaugural Spring for Music festival. View photos from the festival, which is being broadcast on WQXR.

This Friday from 5-8pm, in anticipation of WQXR's kick-off Spring For Music broadcast from Carnegie Hall featuring the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Q2 presents a Spring Fever spotlight on the evocative sound worlds of two featured composers, Aaron Jay Kernis and Paul Moravec. Q2 also turns over the microphone to the composers themselves, as they provide exclusive insights into their own works, from Moravec's Tempest Fantasy to Aaron Jay Kernis's String Quartet No. 2, "musica instrumentalis," both pieces awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

After 37 years on the road, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s has a permanent home base in which it can rehearse, record and manage its administrative affairs, with the opening of the DiMenna Center for Classical Music on Manhattan’s West Side.

For the first composer portrait of 2011, Q2 is pleased to focus on Philadelphia-born composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Throughout the week of January 3, we'll feature some of his seminal works, many introduced by the composer himself.

What touch! Pianist Garrick Ohlsson had an eloquent dialogue tonight with his instrument, with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and with all of us listening to his Carnegie Hall performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Ohlsson's fingers on the keyboard managed precise intricacies, each note articulated clearly, but I was so impressed with the way all notes integrated into a vivid, thrilling whole.

Tonight at 6 p.m. Q2 presents the remaining twelve finalists of Project 440, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's initiative in which young composers compete to get one of four commissions from the orchestra.

Today, Q2 offers 24 straight hours of music composed by the 30 remaining Project 440 artists. With the field about to be narrowed for a second time, it's an opportunity to hear pieces -- including broadcast premieres -- from composers shaping the canon of tomorrow.

The five musicians in this live performance from the Jerome L. Greene Space are the fellows and alumni of The Academy -- a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

An excerpt of Pulitizer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis' newly commissioned work, Concerto with Echoes, performed live in the WNYC Jerome L. Greene Performance Space by members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Fifteen members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform a piece by the Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky.  Orpheus will play a work by Stravinsky in each of their Carnegie concerts this season.