Daniele Rustioni makes his Heinz Hall debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony March 31st and April 2nd with Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the Brahms First Piano Concerto with Francesco Piemontesi, and Unsuk Chin’s "Subito Con Forza." It’s a high wire act because he is also conducting the Metropolitan Opera’s Falstaff during the same weekend with a Saturday matinee live broadcast on radio and to theaters with the HD series. He told the orchestra his Mother will be watching in Italy so it must be good! He flew to Pittsburgh on Thursday morning for rehearsal and he will fly to New York after the Friday performance at Heinz Hall for the Saturday Met Falstaff which begins with an early curtain. Then he returns to Pittsburgh for Sunday afternoon. His friend and mentor Gianadrea Noseda had done something similar a few years ago. Daniele tells Jim Cunningham about his admiration for Italian conductor Victor de Sabata who made his American debut in Pittsburgh at the Syria Mosque. Daniele Rustioni was born in Milan and studied at the Conservatory there. He is married to Francesca Dego and they recoded the Violin Concerto by Ermanno Wolf Ferrari and the Mozart Violin Concertos. About his Falstaff at the Met, Patrick Dillon in Opera Canada wrote: “The not-quite-forty-year-old Milanese has been making ever-increasing waves in the world’s opera houses and concert halls, and at the Met this season he took the virtuosic house band out of the pit and onto the stage of Carnegie Hall for Bartók and Stravinsky before helming the current string of Falstaff's. Everything about his deft, graceful, shipshape account of this infinitely rewarding score seemed unobtrusively right.”