Elgar US 4/7/06 11:13 Am Page 5

557577bk Elgar US 4/7/06 11:13 am Page 5 New Zealand Symphony Orchestra James Judd The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, is the country’s premier professional orchestra. Music Director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the British-born conductor James Judd is also the ELGAR Administered by Radio New Zealand until 1989, it now functions as a government-owned Crown Entity. It has an Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille in France. Within a period of seven years as Music establishment of ninety players and performs over a hundred concerts annually. Touring within New Zealand looms Director in New Zealand, he has embarked on an unprecedented number of recordings with the orchestra for the large in the orchestra’s activities. All its main symphonic programmes are presented in Auckland and Wellington, Naxos label, including works by Copland, Bernstein, Vaughan Williams, Gershwin and many others. He has brought Orchestral Miniatures but the orchestra visits some thirty New Zealand towns and cities annually. Given New Zealand’s geographical the orchestra to a new level of visibility and international acclaim through appearances at the 2000 Summer Sydney isolation, overseas tours are relatively infrequent. In 2005 the orchestra undertook a highly successful tour that Olympic Arts Festival, the 2003 Auckland International Arts Festival, the Osaka Festival of International Orchestras Chanson de Matin • Chanson de Nuit included performances at the BBC Proms, the Concertgebouw, Snape Maltings and the World Expo at Aichi in as well as a specially televised Millennium Concert with Kiri Te Kanawa as soloist. He will lead the orchestra on Japan. Prior to this, the orchestra was last in Europe in 1992 to play at the World Expo in Seville. It has appeared its first ever tour of the major concert halls of Europe culminating with a début appearance at the BBC Proms in the Three Bavarian Dances • Froissart Overture in Australia, New Caledonia, and Osaka in Japan where, in 2003, it opened the second Asia Orchestral Week. James summer of 2005. A graduate of London’s Trinity College of Music, James Judd came to international attention as Judd was appointed Music Director in 1999. Other conductors who have worked with the NZSO during his tenure the Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, a post he accepted at the invitation of Lorin Maazel. Four years include Alexander Lazarev, Dimitri Sitkovetsky, David Atherton, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Edo de Waart, and Matthias later he returned to Europe after being appointed Associate Music Director of the European Community Youth New Zealand Symphony Orchestra • James Judd Bamert. Soloists who have worked with the orchestra recently include Lynn Harrell, Lang Lang, Hilary Hahn, Orchestra by Claudio Abbado, an ensemble with which he continues to serve as an honorary Artistic Director. Since Vadim Repin, Peter Donohoe, Steven Isserlis, Stephen Hough, Jonathan Lemalu and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The that time he has directed the Berlin Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic, conducted in the great concert halls NZSO has an extensive catalogue of CD recordings. It makes one CD of New Zealand music annually, as part of a of Europe, including the Salzburg Mozarteum and Vienna’s Musikverein, and made guest appearances with such commitment to promote and encourage music by New Zealand composers. The most recent CD to be released prestigious ensembles as the Vienna Symphony, Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Prague Symphony, Orchestre features Jonathan Lemalu in a range of operatic repertoire. The orchestra has a strong relationship with Naxos, National de France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Monte Carlo Symphony recording repertoire as diverse as Elgar (three discs), Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven, Bernstein, Copland, Lilburn, Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Flemish Radio Orchestra, and the Mozarteum Orchestra of Sculthorpe, Frank Bridge, Akutagawa, Mendelssohn, Honegger, Liszt, and Vaughan Williams. Over half a million Salzburg. As an opera conductor, he has appeared with the English National Opera conducting productions of Il of these CDs have been sold internationally in the last decade and they have received critical acclaim. NZSO discs trovatore, La traviata, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rigoletto, and Le nozze di Figaro, and at the Glyndebourne Opera (Hummel, Elgar and Bernstein) were chosen for the “Editor’s Choice” section of The Gramophone in 2004. Festival in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. He continues to conduct all the major British ensembles, and was co-founder of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he has led on tours throughout the United States, the Far East and Europe. In North and South America he is a frequent and much-admired guest conductor, having appeared with the orchestras of St Louis, Montreal, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Indianapolis, Utah, Vancouver and Ottawa, and for fourteen years served as Music Director of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, one of America’s orchestral success stories. 8.557577 5 6 8.557577 557577bk Elgar US 4/7/06 11:13 am Page 2 Edward Elgar (1857–1934) interested in Froissart’s Chronicles, his attention also followed by the Sérénade mauresque, originally a Preman Tilson Orchestral Miniatures drawn to references in Sir Walter Scott. In the score of Moorish intermezzo, which seems to wander from his Froissart Overture, written in London in 1890 and Moorish Spain to England at its heart, before the return Preman Tilson moved to New Zealand in 1993 to take up the position of Principal Sir Edward Elgar occupies a strange position in his own always been particularly generous in their treatment of first performed at the Worcester Festival in September of the characteristic rhythms and intervals expected. The Bassoon with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He had previously held positions country. For many he is associated with British, or, more him, but he came to rely on the encouragement of the that year, Elgar quoted lines from Keats: ‘when chivalry third piece, Contrasts: The Gavotte A.D.1700 and 1900, in the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Chicago), Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and specifically, English Imperialism, epitomized in Land of German-born Augustus Johannes Jaeger, a reader for the / Lifted up her lance on high’, from a poem addressed to starts in Baroque elegance and turns to the contemporary the Arizona Opera Company. He has also performed with the Chicago Symphony Hope and Glory, a patriotic anthem now sung with gusto firm, who found in Elgar’s music something much more the poet’s sister-in-law. Elgar was diffident about the before the opening pastiche returns. The whole Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as guest and tongue in cheek on the last night of the London akin to the music of his native country. possible reception of his overture, but it proved movement was apparently suggested by a performance principal with the Sydney Symphony. He attended the Berkshire Music Festival at Promenade Concerts each year. The image of an Public recognition brought Elgar many honours, his successful. In sonata-form it starts with a characteristic Elgar had seen in Leipzig, in which a pair of dancers Tanglewood, as well as conservatories in New York, Boston, and Arizona. Edwardian country gentleman, with his dogs and horses position sealed by the composition of music for the flourish, a chivalric summons, and other contrasting offered a similar contrast, first wearing old-fashioned is misleading. Elgar was the son of a shopkeeper, in the coronation of King Edward VII. He was awarded themes, suggesting elements of medieval romance, are and then modern masks, as they turned to dance with days when to be in trade marked a man for life and honorary doctorates by universities old and new and in introduced and developed, leading to a concise their backs to the audience, but presenting a escape from this background earned a man the name of 1904 received the accolade of a knighthood. Later recapitulation. contemporary appearance. counter-jumper. He married the daughter of a retired official honours included the Order of Merit in the May Song was written in 1901 for piano and for The Minuet, Op. 21, was originally a piano piece, Indian Army general, a pupil of his, nine years his coronation honours of 1911 and finally, in 1931, a violin and piano, to be orchestrated in 1928. It is an written in 1897 for the son of a friend, Paul Kilburn. The senior, and it was she who gave him the necessary baronetcy. Acceptance, as represented by the musical occasional piece of romantic charm. Carissima was following year Elgar made an orchestral version of the support, morally and socially, that finally helped him to establishment of the country, was confirmed by the written in 1913, based on earlier sketches, and intended piece, which was first heard in New Brighton in 1899, make his way in Edwardian society. Nevertheless, award of the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic for recording, the beginning of Elgar’s practical interest conducted by Granville Bantock. It won some fame in musically Elgar was far nearer to the German romantic Society in 1925, after an earlier award to Delius. and involvement in this new technology. It is again a this form, as did Chanson de Matin and Chanson de composers of his time than to the developing vein of Elgar’s work had undergone significant changes in piece of immediate appeal, in the composer’s Nuit, Op. 15, Nos. 1 and 2. These last were originally English music, with its pastoral reliance on newly the later years of the 1914-18 war, a development unmistakable musical language. violin pieces, the second, written in 1897, dedicated to collected folk-song. evident in his Cello Concerto of 1919.

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