Alessio Bax & Doug Fitch 10/18/2015

IN SITU: PICTURES IN THE MAKING WITH ALESSIO BAX & DOUG FITCH 10/18/2015 Program Alessio Bax Mussorgsky’s PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION First Prize winner at the Leeds International Piano Competition, the recipient of an Avery Gnomus Fisher Career Grant and Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, and recognized by Il Vecchio Castello Gramophone as “clearly among the most remarkable young pianists now before the Tuileries (Children Quarreling After Play) public,” Alessio Bax is a star on the rise. He has appeared as soloist with more than 100 Bydlo orchestras, including the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, Japan’s NHK Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells Symphony, the Dallas Symphony with Jaap van Zweden, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor with Yuri Temirkanov, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Sir Simon Limoges, The Market Place (Great News!) Rattle. The new Russian album marks the latest addition to a burgeoning discography Catacombae, Sepulcrum Romanum that includes works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky Con Mortuis in Lingua Mortua – all of which have been singled out for distinction by the most discerning critics. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga) The Great Gate of Kiev Doug Fitch Performers American visual artist and director Doug Fitch works with multiple mediums, from drawing Alessio Bax, pianist and sculpture to theater, architecture, and food. The co-founder of the theater and Doug Fitch, artist entertainment company Giants Are Small, he is best known for his opera productions for the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic, where his work includes stagings of Le Grand A Note From Alessio... Macabre (named best opera of 2010 by the New York Times, New York magazine, and Time Out New York) and The Cunning Little Vixen (chosen as New York magazine’s “Best The music on this album describes emotions in strong colors, in a passionate and Classical Event of 2011”). Fitch’s collaborators include James Levine, Alan Gilbert, unabashedly Russian way. The centerpiece, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Leonard Slatkin, Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson, Karole Armitage, Joshua Bell, and needs no introduction. Ravel made it famous with his incredible orchestration, but I puppeteer Jim Henson (The Muppets, Sesame Street). wanted to go back to the original version, as if trying to clear my ears of the beautiful colors of the Ravel, and dig out the typically Russian colors that I think are embedded within the piano score. I was fueled by years of studying Russian piano, orchestral and chamber music and by my extensive travels all across Russia. In the process I found the original “Pictures” to be just as colorful as Ravel’s re-interpretation and, at the same time, quite different. All of a sudden the piece, which I had heard through all my years of studying piano played by countless pianists, and which always struck me as very powerful but uneven, made perfect musical and pianistic sense to me. It struck me as incredibly descriptive, much more than the actual drawings and paintings that inspired it. I toured with it for a while and decided to record my own version. I have mostly stuck to the original writing, although I decided to thicken it up in a few places, to give it a richer, wider and perhaps more dramatic palette. – Alessio Bax -Gramophone, August 28, 2015 .

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