It’s hard to believe that the National Schadt String Competition, sponsored by the Allentown Symphony Association, is coming up on a 20-year celebration. It seems like just yesterday I was sitting with a group of wonderful volunteers, researching and planning how we would set up the competition and what the age ranges would be. I remember working carefully to define the criteria, the repertoire and the prizes.

Now, 20 years later, we have established a world-renowned string competition with an $8,000 First Prize, where people from all over the world come to the Lehigh Valley the first weekend in March to compete to win the Schadt Competition Prizes and to perform with the Allentown Symphony Orchestra.

The Allentown Symphony Orchestra concerts, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14 and 3 p.m. Nov. 15, Miller Symphony Hall, Allentown, will feature the winner of this past year’s competition, Violinist, Zeyu Victor Li. At just 18 years old, he is the youngest participant ever to win the Schadt Competition. The rules allow string players between the ages of 18-30 to compete.

Victor was born in Huaunan City, China, and is a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, where he studies with Aaron Rosand. In addition to winning First Prize in the National Schadt String Competition, he was a recent prize winner at the Montreal International Violin Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, New York.

For his performance with the ASO, Victor will play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, a haunting work that was written in 1904 but became popular in 1935 when the famous violinist Jascha Heifetz began to perform and tour with the piece. Now it is a part of the standard concert repertoire and is known for its beautiful opening melody and its particularly difficult last movement where the violinist has to play double stops and fast scale passages, among other virtuoso techniques.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Schadt String Competition, the Allentown Symphony commissioned a new violin piece with orchestra from the Internationally-recognized composer Roberto Sierra. At the November concerts, we perform the world premiere of “Rapsódico,” a challenging work that will forever carry the name of the Schadt String Competition onto concert stages.

Also, as a tribute to our celebration of string instruments, we begin the program with a strings-only piece, “Strut” by Michael Daugherty. I programmed this piece because it is rhythmic, fun and full of confidence and attitude: exactly the attributes needed to become a Schadt Competition winner.

The second half of the program features Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, or, as we in the music industry like to call it, Tchaik 5. This is a piece that Tchaikovsky struggled with in composing. During the days when he was working on the piece, he often felt frustrated and fearful that he was “played out,” with nothing left to say as a composer. “I have to squeeze it from my dull brain,” he wrote to his patron in a letter. In the end, though, in November 1888, he conducted the premiere of his new 5th Symphony to positive acclaim.

The 5th Symphony was completed about 10 years after Tchaikovsky’s 4th and continues his obsession with fate. While the 4th Symphony had been a triumph over fate, the 5th Symphony s more of a resignation to fate, or as Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, “a resignation before the inscrutable predestination of Providence.”

He presents the famous fate motif in the beginning of the symphony, played quietly by the clarinets, and then by the bassoons. The fate motif returns many times, changing and morphing, until he uses it in a more positive major key in the final movement, giving us a sense of hope and fulfillment.

Whenever I think of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, however, I don’t think of the famous fate motif, but rather the beautiful and haunting French Horn melody that begins the second movement. The music was used in 1939 by André Kostelanetz and his friends, Mack Davis and Mack David, to create the melody for the famous pop song “Moon Love.”

For every French Horn player, performing this second movement is one of the scariest, but most glorious moments. They know that they have the opportunity to play beautifully, but every note must be carefully placed, and everyone is listening to every note. If you have played the French Horn before, you know how difficult it is to get each note to come out correctly. It takes great practice and finesse.

The third movement of the Symphony is one of Tchaikovsky’s famous waltzes, similar to some of the music he wrote for his “Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake” ballets. The movement is lilting and wistful. Tchaikovsky alternates stately waltz sections with scale-like passages in the strings and woodwinds, finally layering them on top of each other at the end of the movement. The challenge as a conductor is to make sure your tempo stays the same for both sections so that when they are finally played together at the end, the music layers seamlessly.

And, of course, the piece has a grand, exciting finale. One of the early reviewers referred to it as “a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker - pandemonium.” Of course, everyone loved it. I hear that at the first performance, those in the audience clapped so hard and long that the final movement had to be encored and played again. Perhaps that will happen with our concerts on Saturday and Sunday with the Allentown Symphony.

A free “Meet the Artist” brown bag lunch with Zeyu Victor Li and Diane Wittry is noon - 1 p.m. Nov 13, Miller Symphony Hall.

Diane Wittry is Music Director and Conductor of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Director (USA), International Cultural Exchange Program for Classical Musicians, Sarajevo Philharmonic, Bosnia, and author, “Beyond the Baton” and “Baton Basics” (both, Oxford University Press).

Tickets: Miller Symphony Hall Box Office, 23 N. Sixth St., Allentown; allentownsymphony.org; 610-432-6715