Season 2010 Season 2010-2011
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Season 20102010----20112011 The Philadelphia Orchestra Thursday, January 20, at 8:00 FriFriFriday,Fri day, January 212121,21 , at 222:002:00:00:00 Saturday, January 222222,22 , at 8:00 Alan Gilbert Conductor Richard Woodhams Oboe Lindberg EXPO First Philadelphia Orchestra performances—funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Rouse Oboe Concerto (in one movement) First Philadelphia Orchestra performances—funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Intermission Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (“Pastoral”) I. Allegro, ma non troppo (Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arriving in the country) II. Andante molto moto (Scene by the brook) III. Allegro—Presto (Merry gathering of peasants)— IV. Allegro (Tempest, storm)— V. Allegretto (Shepherds’ hymn—Happy and thankful feelings after the storm) This program runs approximately 1 hour, 35 minutes. Alan Gilbert became music director of the New York Philharmonic in September 2009, the first native New Yorker to hold that post. In the 2010–11 season he conducts the orchestra in a staged presentation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Mahler’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies and Kindertotenlieder, the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s a Voice, a Messenger, the New York premiere of composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft, and both programs in the orchestra’s new music series, CONTACT! Mr. Gilbert will also lead the orchestra in two tours of European music capitals, two performances at Carnegie Hall, and a free Memorial Day concert at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. This season Mr. Gilbert will also conduct several other leading orchestras at home and abroad, including Hamburg’s NDR Symphony, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and, for the first time, Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He has previously led such ensembles as the Berlin and Los Angeles philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Bavarian Radio symphonies; and the Cleveland and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras. His Philadelphia Orchestra debut was in 2003. In 2009 Mr. Gilbert became the first person to hold the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at the Juilliard School. In June 2008 he was named conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic following his final concert as chief conductor and artistic advisor. He has been principal guest conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony since 2004, and he was the first music director of the Santa Fe Opera, from 2003 to 2006. Mr. Gilbert studied at Harvard University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School. From 1995 to 1997 he was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recording of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite with the Chicago Symphony was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award, and his recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone magazine. In May 2010 the Curtis Institute of Music awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Music degree. Richard Woodhams became principal oboe of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1977, succeeding John de Lancie, his distinguished teacher at the Curtis Institute. Mr. de Lancie was a pupil of Marcel Tabuteau, one of the most influential instrumentalists of the 20th century, who served as principal oboe of the Orchestra from 1915 until 1954. Mr. Woodhams’s tenure has included solo appearances with The Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia, as well as in New York, Boston, and other cities throughout the United States and Asia in collaboration with its four previous music directors. His recordings with the Orchestra include Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with Wolfgang Sawallisch. Mr. Woodhams has given first performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra of solo works by J.S. Bach, Bellini, Haydn, Rochberg, Joan Tower, and Vaughan Williams. He has also given premieres of chamber works by William Bolcom, Chuck Holdeman, Thea Musgrave, Bernard Rands, Ned Rorem, Richard Wernick, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Mr. Woodhams has played solo works with such notable musicians as violinists Alexander Schneider and Itzhak Perlman, pianists Christoph Eschenbach and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and the Guarneri, Shanghai, and de Pasquale string quartets. He has also recorded Joan Tower’s Island Prelude with the Tokyo String Quartet. Active as a teacher at the Curtis Institute and Temple University, Mr. Woodhams’s former pupils occupy prominent positions in orchestras both in the United States and abroad, including principal posts in the orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Pittsburgh. He is also a founding and current member of the World Orchestra for Peace, an internationally assembled orchestra founded by Sir Georg Solti in 1995, now led by Valery Gergiev. Since 2000 Mr. Woodhams has taught and played annually at the Aspen Music Festival, where he performed Christopher Rouse’s Oboe Concerto in 2009 with David Robertson; he has also participated in the Marlboro and La Jolla music festivals, among others. He began his musical studies in his native Palo Alto, California, with Raymond Dusté and started his orchestral career with the Saint Louis Symphony under Walter Susskind at the age of 19. FRAMING THE PROGRAM The first half of today’s program features two recent works by leading composers of their generation. Magnus Lindberg composed EXPO to celebrate Maestro Alan Gilbert’s inaugural concert in September 2009 as music director of the New York Philharmonic. As the title suggests, the brief piece is a showpiece for virtuoso orchestras. Gilbert has also been a champion of the American composer Christopher Rouse, who has distinguished himself for his ability to synthesize different musical styles and traditions. We hear his Oboe Concerto, written in 2004 to honor the centennial of the Minnesota Orchestra. Beethoven famously said of his Symphony No. 6—which he entitled the “Pastoral”—that it was “more an expression of feeling than painting.” Although he did include some realistic touches in the Symphony, such as bird calls and a violent storm, the work is preeminently a testament to Beethoven’s love of nature. Parallel Events 1808 Beethoven Symphony No. 6 Music Weber Silvana Literature Goethe Faust, Pt. I Art Ingres La Grande Baigneuse History U.S. prohibits importation of slaves from Africa EXPO Magnus Lindberg Born in Helsinki, June 27, 1958 Now living there Big and bold, this 10-minute piece was conceived to open many things at the same time: a concert, a season (the New York Philharmonic’s of 2009-10), a musical directorship (Alan Gilbert’s), and a two-year period in which its composer is serving as composer-in-residence with Mr. Gilbert and his home orchestra. In the Right Place at the Right Time Magnus Lindberg’s progress to this position has been confident and assured—qualities emphatically present in his music. Born in Helsinki, he was introduced to musical high modernism—across the range from Iannis Xenakis to Milton Babbitt—by a high school teacher, and went on to study composition at the Sibelius Academy in the mid-’70s. It was a good time to be there. His professors, the distinguished composers Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen, were themselves making discoveries and passing them on to their students, who also included Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen. With them and other classmates, Lindberg founded a society to present and discuss new music, and out of that developed an electronic-instrumental performing group. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the ’80s, he was continuing his studies in Paris—again arriving at the right time, for these were the early days of Pierre Boulez’s computer-music facility IRCAM, where Lindberg held a scholarship, and also of so-called spectral music, to which he was introduced as a pupil of Gérard Grisey. All this varied experience, with the important addition of heavy metal, fed into his breakthrough piece, the mighty Kraft (1983-85), for large orchestra with amplified soloists, in which robust rhythms were applied to dense yet luminous sound masses, and in which a young modernist laid claim to the weight and amplitude of Mahler or Richard Strauss. Over the next few years, Lindberg steadily moved forward by absorbing more from the music of the early 20th century, in terms of colorful scoring and harmony, whose resources for driving forward motion were especially important to him. Like Ravel or Sibelius, he found that new kinds of harmonic progressions were still possible with the old chords of major-minor tonality: We hear a lot of these chords in EXPO, sounding fresh by virtue not only of the supremely skilful orchestration but also of the new routes along which the harmony courses. This strong harmony gave Lindberg access to a symphonic kind of power and presence, fully achieved in his 40-minute Aura (1993-94). Since then he has been almost constantly at work on big orchestral scores, including the triptych Feria –Parada –Cantigas (1997-2001), a Concerto for Orchestra (2002-03), Sculpture (2005), Seht die Sonne (2007), GRAFFITI (2008-09, with chorus singing Latin inscriptions), and Al largo (2009-10), as well as shorter pieces, such as EXPO , or Chorale (2001-02). Concertos for horn, cello, clarinet, and violin also date from the last 12 years. A Closer Look Lindberg has said that he chose the title of EXPO to suggest, simultaneously, an exhibition of the orchestra and its possibilities, an exposition of a new music director and his potential, and a musical exposition, and also because he liked the sound—perhaps, one may guess, for the exciting fizz of sibilant into plosive, a very Lindbergian gesture. The work starts with another: a whipcrack that sets off racing 16th notes in the violins, joined by the violas in a rush up to a surprising chord (F major), which is immediately taken over by the brass to begin the chorale phrase they intone.