New York Philharmonic Contact: Katherine E. Johnson

(212) 875-5718; [email protected]

May 23–June 11, 2016

MAY 11, 2016, AT THE DAVID RUBENSTEIN ATRIUM AT LINCOLN CENTER: “NY PHIL BIENNIAL: A Player’s Guide” A Free Biennial Preview Night with ALAN GILBERT in Conversation with Jay CAMPBELL, , , , Martin BRESNICK, Hilary PURRINGTON, Lisa BIELAWA, Colin JACOBSEN, and Dianne BERKUN MENAKER Video Available On-Demand After the Event

The will present “NY PHIL BIENNIAL: A Player’s Guide,” a free Insights at the Atrium event Wednesday, May 11, 2016, featuring Music Director Alan Gilbert and artists from across the new-music spectrum in a special preview of the NY PHIL BIENNIAL. Panelists will include cellist Jay Campbell; violinist Jennifer Koh; composers Martin Bresnick, John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, Hilary Purrington, and Christopher Theofanidis; composer and violinist Colin Jacobsen; composer and San Francisco Girls Chorus artistic director Lisa Bielawa; and Brooklyn Youth Chorus artistic director and conductor Dianne Berkun Menaker.

The event takes place at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (Broadway at 62nd Street) and is co-presented with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Related Events  On-Demand Video Video will be available on-demand after the event, leading up to and during the biennial, on nyphil.org/biennial

 Play Date All audience members attending “NY PHIL BIENNIAL: A Player’s Guide” on May 11 are invited to the NY PHIL BIENNIAL Play Date, a post-concert meet-up with composers and performers over cocktails, at the David Rubenstein Atrium.

 #biennialist The New York Philharmonic invites audience members to be a #biennialist. The five attendees who attend the most NY PHIL BIENNIAL events and post about it on social media will win a free pair of tickets to the final concert, featuring the New York Philharmonic conducted by Music Director Alan Gilbert, June 11 at 7:00 p.m at David Geffen Hall. Additional prizes and offerings for #biennialists will be offered; follow the New York Philharmonic on its social media channels (instagram.com/nyphilharmonic and twitter.com/nyphil) for more information.

About the NY PHIL BIENNIAL A flagship project of the New York Philharmonic, the NY PHIL BIENNIAL is a wide- ranging exploration of today’s music that brings together an international roster of composers, performers, and curatorial voices for concerts presented both on the Lincoln Center campus and with partners in venues throughout the city. The second NY PHIL BIENNIAL, taking place May 23–June 11, 2016, will feature diverse programs — ranging from solo works to a chamber opera to large scale symphonies — by more than 100 composers, more than half of whom are American; present some of the country’s top music schools and youth choruses; and expand to more New York City neighborhoods. A range of events and activities will engender an ongoing dialogue among artists, composers, and audience members. Partners in the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL include National Sawdust; 92nd Street Y; Aspen Music Festival and School; Interlochen Center for the Arts; League of Composers/ISCM; Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; LUCERNE FESTIVAL; MetLiveArts; New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art; WQXR’s Q2 Music; and Yale School of Music. For complete information about the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, see press release.

Speakers Music Director Alan Gilbert began his New York Philharmonic tenure in 2009, the first native New Yorker in the post. He and the Philharmonic have introduced the positions of The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, and Artist-in-Association; CONTACT!, the new-music series; the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, an exploration of today’s music; and the New York Philharmonic Global Academy, partnerships with cultural institutions to offer training of pre- professional musicians, often alongside performance residencies. As The New Yorker wrote, “Gilbert has made an indelible mark on the orchestra’s history and that of the city itself.”

Alan Gilbert’s 2015–16 Philharmonic highlights include R. Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben to welcome Concertmaster Frank Huang; ’s Opening Night Gala; and four World Premieres. He co-curates and conducts in the second NY PHIL BIENNIAL and performs in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. He leads the Orchestra as part of the Shanghai Orchestra Academy and Residency Partnership and appears at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West. Philharmonic-tenure highlights include acclaimed stagings of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson (for which Mr. Gilbert was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction), and Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake starring Marion Cotillard; 24 World

Premieres; The Nielsen Project, a performance and recording cycle; Verdi Requiem and Bach’s B-minor Mass; the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey alongside the film; Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony on the tenth anniversary of 9/11; and nine tours around the world. In August 2015 he led the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the U.S. Stage Premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, co-presented as part of the Lincoln Center–New York Philharmonic Opera Initiative.

Conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and former principal guest conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra, Alan Gilbert regularly conducts leading orchestras around the world. This season Mr. Gilbert makes debuts with four great European orchestras — Filarmonica della Scala, Dresden Staatskapelle, London Symphony, and Academy of St Martin in the Fields — and returns to The and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting ’s Doctor Atomic in 2008, the DVD of which received a Grammy Award. Renée Fleming’s recent Decca recording Poèmes, on which he conducted, received a 2013 Grammy Award. His recordings have received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone magazine. Mr. Gilbert is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at The Juilliard School, where he holds the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies. His honors include an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Curtis Institute of Music (2010), Columbia University’s Ditson Conductor’s Award for his “exceptional commitment to the performance of works by American composers and to contemporary music” (2011), election to The American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2014), a Foreign Policy Association Medal for his commitment to cultural diplomacy (2015), and being named Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

American cellist Jay Campbell has already forged a reputation as a spellbinding artist. Recently named a 2016 recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is known for his eclectic musical interests, having collaborated with musicians, including , Pierre Boulez, David Lang, , and members of Radiohead and Einstürzende Neubauten, and for working with leading new music groups, such as ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Ensemble InterContemporain, Da Capo Chamber Players, and the Argento Ensemble. As a chamber musician, he has worked with members of the Arditti, Takacs, Kronos, and Afiara string quartets. Mr. Campbell has premiered almost 100 works to date, including concertos by Chris Rogerson and Lang. Co-commissioned by the Human Rights Foundation, David Fulmer is composing Genus and Species, a concerto, for him by David Fulmer, to be premiered in the 2015–16 season. Mr. Campbell’s association with Zorn has resulted in more than a half-dozen new works for cello. Hen to Pan, a CD with all of Zorn’s compositions for him Zorn, was released in February 2015. Recipient of awards from the BMI and ASCAP foundations, Jay Campbell was also First Prize winner of the 2012 Concert Artist Guild auditions, and Second Prize winner of the 2015 Walter W. Naumburg International Cello Competition. Born in Berkeley, California, he is currently an Artist Diploma candidate at The Juilliard School studying with cellist Fred Sherry. Mr. Campbell previously appeared with the New York Philharmonic as part of a January 2013 Young People’s Concert, led by Joshua Weilerstein.

Jennifer Koh is recognized for intense, commanding performances, delivered with dazzling virtuosity and technical assurance. With an impassioned musical curiosity, she is forging an artistic path of her own devising, choosing works that both inspire and challenge. She is dedicated to performing the violin repertoire of all eras from traditional to contemporary, believing that the past and present form a continuum. Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, Ms. Koh has performed with leading orchestras worldwide and appears frequently at major music centers and festivals as a prolific recitalist. This season, she makes debuts with the Pittsburgh Symphony and RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Italy, and returns to the Buffalo Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and Deutsche Radiophilharmonie. She performs Anna Clyne’s violin concerto, composed for her, with the Cincinnati Symphony, Princeton Symphony, and the BBC Philharmonic (in its U.K. premiere). She also partners with pianist in Bridge to Beethoven, a recital series that explores the impact Beethoven has had on a diverse group of composers and musicians by pairing Beethoven’s complete violin sonatas with new works by Anthony Cheung, , and Andrew Norman. A major highlight of Jennifer Koh’s season is the launch of Shared Madness, her project as part of the NY PHIL BIENNIAL that presents World Premieres of short works for solo violin by more than 30 of today’s most celebrated composers who have generously gifted their music for the project. Ms. Koh regularly records for the Cedille label. Her recent albums include Bach and Beyond Part 1 and Bach and Beyond Part 2, based on her recital series of the same name; Two x Four, an album of double violin concertos with and the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble; Signs, Games + Messages with Mr. Wosner; and Grammy-nominated String Poetic with pianist Reiko Uchida. Born in Chicago of Korean parents, Jennifer Koh made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11 and won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Concert Artists Guild Competition, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has a bachelor of arts in English literature from and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she worked with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir. She is founder and artistic director of MusicBridge, a non-profit organization promoting collaborations among artists of diverse disciplines and styles. Ms. Koh made her Philharmonic debut in July 2006 on the Concerts in the Parks, conducted by Xian Zhang, and she most recently appeared on a subscription program for Lutosławski’s Chain 2: Dialogue for Violin and Orchestra led by Lorin Maazel in January 2013.

Martin Bresnick’s compositions — which range from opera, chamber, and symphonic music to film scores and computer music — are performed throughout the world. He delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies, and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. However, his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms. In addition to his been awarded many prizes and commissions — among them the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission — Martin Bresnick is also recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his

critical encouragement. Martin Bresnick’s compositions are published by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven; and have been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records, and Artifact Music.

John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last 40 years. Mr. Corigliano’s scores, now numbering over 100, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Recent scores include One Sweet Morning (2011), a four- movement song cycle premiered by the New York Philharmonic and Stephanie Blythe; Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for and introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005), developed from the themes of the score to the film of the same name, which won Mr. Corigliano an Oscar in 1999; Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) for orchestra and amplified soprano, the recording of which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition in 2008; Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004), scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles; and Symphony No. 2 (2001 Pulitzer Prize for Music). Other important scores include String Quartet (1995 Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Composition); Symphony No. 1 (1991 Grawemeyer Award); the Concerto (1977); and the opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991 Metropolitan Opera commission), which was revived by Los Angeles Opera in 2015, conducted by James Conlon, staged by Tony Award–winning director Darko Tresnjac, and starred Patricia Racette, Christopher Maltman, and Patti LuPone. The Houston Symphony Orchestra commissioned John Corigliano to create a new orchestral version of Stomp, which premiered in the fall of 2015. His music is performed widely on North American and international stages. Mr. Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at The Juilliard School and holds the position of distinguished professor of music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name. His music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and one of the youngest composers ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America’s most honored and frequently performed composers. His music — full of variety and dynamic energy, and rich in lyric beauty, poetic imagery, and brilliant instrumental color — appears on programs worldwide. He has been commissioned by preeminent performing organizations and artists, including sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw; violinists Joshua Bell, James Ehnes, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; and guitarist Sharon Isbin, as well as by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota, Saint Paul Chamber, and Orpheus orchestras, and the Walt Disney Company, Rose Center for Earth and Space, and Society of Lincoln Center. His honors include Northwestern University’s Nemmers Prize, induction into the Classical Music Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy nomination for Air and his Second Symphony. Recent and upcoming

projects include concertos for cellist Joshua Roman, violist Paul Neubauer, flutist Marina Piccinini, and violinist James Ehnes, and a work for the San Francisco Girls Chorus and The Knights for the NY PHIL BIENNIAL. He is the newly named workshop director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and served as new music adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 11 years. He has been on the composition faculty at Yale since 2003. His music is available on Nonesuch, Phoenix, New World, Naxos, Virgin, Arabesque, and elsewhere. Leta Miller’s book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press. Kernis’s music is published by AJK Music, administered by Associated Music Publishers / G.Schirmer, Inc.

Hilary Purrington is a New England-based composer of contemporary classical music. Her work has received recognition from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), the Massachusetts Music Educators’ Association (MMEA), Houston Grand Opera’s Home and Place, and Voices of Change / Dallas Symphony Orchestra, among others. In the summer of 2012, Ms. Purrington received funding through a Wagoner Foreign Study Grant to study Music Composition and German Language at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the summer of 2013 she participated as a Fellow at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival’s New Music Workshop. Her music has been performed by many notable ensembles, including the American Modern Ensemble, the NOVUS Quartet, and the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble. Recent projects include commissions from the Chicago Harp Quartet and the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC. Hilary Purrington holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. She is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts at the Yale School of Music.

Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1967, Christopher Theofanidis has composed works that have been performed by leading orchestras around the world, including The , Moscow Soloists, and the London, National, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, and California symphony orchestras. He also served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra during their 2006–07 season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang. Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize (hosted at the Barbican Centre in London), the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, six ASCAP–Gould Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Tanglewood Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship. In 2007 he received a Grammy nomination for Best Composition for There and Now, for chorus and orchestra, based on the poetry of Rumi. His orchestral concert work, Rainbow Body, has been performed by more than 100 orchestras internationally, making it one of the most performed new orchestral works of the last ten years. Christopher Theofanidis has recently written a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre and a work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as part of their New Brandenburg series, and he is currently commissioned to compose operas for San Francisco Opera and Houston Grand Opera. He has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony, which premiered and recorded his Symphony. Mr. Theofanidis has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program and is a former

faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory and The Juilliard School. He currently teaches at Yale University.

Violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen is a founding member of two game-changing, audience-expanding ensembles — the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and orchestra The Knights. As a violinist, he is a touring member of Yo-Yo Ma’s venerated Silk Road Project and a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Mr. Jacobsen’s work as a composer developed as a natural outgrowth of his chamber and orchestral collaborations. Jointly inspired by encounters with leading exponents of non-western traditions and by his own classical heritage, his most recent compositions for Brooklyn Rider include Three Miniatures, which were written for the reopening of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Islamic art galleries. Colin Jacobsen collaborated with Iran’s Siamak Aghaei to write a Persian folk-inflected composition, Ascending Bird, which he performed as soloist with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House, in a concert that was streamed live by millions of viewers worldwide. Mr. Jacobsen’s work for dance and theater includes Chalk and Soot, a collaboration with Dance Heginbotham, and music for Compagnia de’ Colombari’s theatrical production of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Ms. Bielawa played violin and , sang, and composed from childhood. She moved to New York in 1990, after graduating from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring as the vocalist with the Ensemble in 1992 and has premiered and toured works by John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, and Michael Gordon. In 1997 she co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. Ms. Bielawa was appointed artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus in 2013 and is an artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California. Lisa Bielawa’s music is frequently performed throughout the U.S. and Europe. Recent highlights include a performance of Trojan Women at Le Poisson Rouge and a residency at Zorn’s The Stone, plus world premieres of Hypermelodia at The Rivers School Conservatory, The Right Weather by ACO at Carnegie Hall, The Lay of the Love and Death at Lincoln Center, Chance Encounter by Susan Narucki and The Knights, and Airfield Broadcasts, a work for hundreds of musicians that was premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin in May 2013 and later performed at Crissy Field in San Francisco in October 2013. Ms. Bielawa is currently at work on Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser, a new opera composed on a libretto by Erik Ehn and directed by Charles Otte, created for episodic release via broadcast and online media. Vireo won the 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Multimedia Award. Her latest album, The Lay of the Love, was released on Innova in June 2015.

Dianne Berkun Menaker is the founder and artistic director of Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Under her visionary leadership, the chorus has become one of the most highly regarded ensembles in the country and has stretched the artistic boundaries for the youth chorus. She has prepared choruses for performances with acclaimed conductors, including Alan Gilbert, Marin Alsop, James Levine, Charles Dutoit, and Robert Spano. Most notably,

she prepared the chorus for its 2002 debut with the New York Philharmonic in John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, the recording for which the chorus won a Grammy Award in 2005. Ms. Berkun Menaker has also prepared the Chorus for appearances and recordings with artists such as Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Lou Reed, Philip Glass, Grizzly Bear, John Legend, Natasha Bedingfield, and Alicia Keys. Out of a desire to showcase the chorus’s versatility and uniquely beautiful sounds, she has developed an active commissioning program, collaborating with some of the most important composers of our time. Ms. Berkun Menaker is a regular choral clinician and teaching artist for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic and The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall and has also presented workshops and master classes for New York University, New York State School Music Association, the American Choral Directors Association, and the New York City Department of Education. She is the creator of the chorus’s Cross-Choral Training program, a proven holistic and experiential approach to developing singers in a group setting encompassing both voice and musicianship pedagogy.

* * * Major support for the NY PHIL BIENNIAL is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and The Francis Goelet Fund.

* * * Additional funding is provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation and Honey M. Kurtz.

* * * Insights at the Atrium is presented in partnership with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.

Tickets Insights at the Atrium events are free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Subscribers, Friends at the Fellow level and above, and Patrons may secure guaranteed admission by emailing [email protected]. Space is limited.

For press tickets, call Lanore Carr at the New York Philharmonic at (212) 875-5714, or e- mail her at [email protected].

For more information about all NY PHIL BIENNIAL events, visit nyphil.org/biennial.

INSIGHTS AT THE ATRIUM: “NY PHIL BIENNIAL: A Player’s Guide”

David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (Broadway at 62nd Street)

Wednesday, May 11, 2016, 7:30 p.m. Video will be available on-demand after the event on nyphil.org/biennial

New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert, host Cellist Jay Campbell, speaker Violinist Jennifer Koh, speaker Composers Martin Bresnick, John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, Hilary Purrington, Christopher Theofanidis, speakers Composer and violinist Colin Jacobsen, speaker Composer and artistic director Lisa Bielawa, speaker Choral director Dianne Berkun Menaker, speaker

Music Director Alan Gilbert and artists from across the new-music spectrum preview highlights of the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL.

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ALL PROGRAMS SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Photography is available for the NY PHIL BIENNIAL at nyphil.org/newsroom/1516/biennial or by contacting the Communications Department at (212) 875-5700; [email protected].