February 22, 2012 SUPPLEMENT CHRISTOPHER ROUSE
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FOR RELEASE: February 22, 2012 SUPPLEMENT CHRISTOPHER ROUSE THE 2012–13 MARIE-JOSÉE KRAVIS COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE First Season of Two-Year Term: WORLD PREMIERE, SEEING, PHANTASMATA Advisory Role on CONTACT!, with WORLD, U.S., AND NEW YORK PREMIERES, Led by JAYCE OGREN and ALAN GILBERT _____________________________________ “I just love the Philharmonic musicians: I love working with them, and they play my music with incredible commitment. As a kid in Baltimore I grew up with their recordings, and then, of course, I also heard them on the Young People’s Concerts on television. I’ve always had a special feeling for the Philharmonic because the musicians have always played like they really meant it, with such energy and commitment; and when I got older and wrote music that they played, they did it the same way. I’m thrilled to be able to work with them more closely.” — Christopher Rouse _______________________________________ Christopher Rouse has been named The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the Philharmonic, and will begin his two-year tenure in the 2012–13 season. He is the second composer to hold this title, following the tenure of Magnus Lindberg. The Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning American composer will be represented by three works with the Philharmonic this season in concerts conducted by Alan Gilbert: Phantasmata, February 21 and 22, 2013; a World Premiere–New York Philharmonic Commission, April 17–20, 2013, which will also be taken on the EUROPE / SPRING 2013 tour; and the reprise of Seeing for Piano and Orchestra (commissioned by the Philharmonic and premiered in 1999), June 20–22, 2013, performed by Emanuel Ax, the 2012–13 Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, for whom it was written. Mr. Rouse will also advise on CONTACT!, the Orchestra’s new-music series with performances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peter Norton Symphony Space. The first program, December 21–22, 2012, will feature American conductor/composer Jayce Ogren leading an all- American program, with soprano Elizabeth Futral as soloist; on the second, April 5–6, 2013, Music Director Alan Gilbert will conduct a combination of U.S. and New York premieres of works by contemporary Europe-based composers, with Principal Oboe Liang Wang as the soloist. 2 Alan Gilbert said: “Chris Rouse is one of the most important composers working today. I’ve recorded a lot of his music, and it has been a very meaningful and a large part of my musical life for a long time. He has a unique voice and is one of the composers who truly hears what he writes. He doesn’t leave anything to chance: he actually shapes the sound and the emotional flow of his music in a way that only great composers can.” Christopher Rouse said: “I have great admiration for Alan Gilbert, and I think our feelings about music line up very, very often. I think we’ll work well together because I think we’re on the same page most of the time.” Orchestra To Perform World Premiere–New York Philharmonic Commission of New Rouse Work On April 17–20, 2013, Mr. Gilbert will conduct the World Premiere of a New York Philharmonic Commission by Christopher Rouse, the 2012–13 Marie-Josée Kravis Composer- in-Residence. The program — featuring three iconic American composers — will also include Serenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”) from 1954 by the Philharmonic’s Laureate Conductor Leonard Bernstein, with violinist Joshua Bell as soloist, and Ives’s Symphony No. 4, of 1910– 16. Following its premiere, the new work by Rouse will be performed in May 2013 on the EUROPE / SPRING 2013 tour. Details on the new work will be announced at a later date. The Philharmonic has commissioned three previous works by Mr. Rouse: Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra (December 1992, which won the Pulitzer Prize); Seeing for Piano and Orchestra (May 1999), which will be reprised at the end of the 2012–13 season by Emanuel Ax; and Odna zhizn (A Life), which Alan Gilbert led in its premiere (February 2010). Alan Gilbert To Conduct Rouse’s 1985 Phantasmata On February 21– 22, 2013, Mr. Gilbert will lead Phantasmata, Mr. Rouse’s 1985 work that builds upon his 1981 The Infernal Machine, which is used as Phantasmata’s middle movement. Encouraged to expand that earlier work by composer Joseph Schwantner, the work was originally composed for the St. Louis Symphony, which gave the premiere of the complete 18- minute piece under Leonard Slatkin on October 24, 1986. Mr. Rouse said: “It’s one of my kind of wild and crazy works, particularly because of the last movement, Bump, which is a somewhat quasi-apocalyptic affair…. These essentially are dream images, and each movement is quite different — the first movement is very slow and atmospheric; the second movement, The Infernal Machine … imagines an enormous machine eternally in motion for no particular purpose; and then Bump is the Boston Pops in Hell.” The title Phantasmata comes from the writings of Paracelsus (1493–1541), the physician and occultist who used the term to refer to “hallucinations created by thought.” The first movement, “The Evestrum of Juan de la Cruz in the Sagrada Familia, 3 A.M.,” is scored for strings and percussion; according to Mr. Rouse’s notes on the work, it “makes use of Paracelsian terminology — ‘vestrum’ is Paracelsus’s name for the astral body; thus, this opening movement represents a dreamt out-of-body ‘somnambulatory journey’ through Antonio Gaudí’s remarkable 3 Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.” The second movement, The Infernal Machine, for full orchestra, is “a darker hallucinatory image, as the immense juggernaut, eternally in motion for no particular purpose, is represented by a perpetuum mobile, wherein the leviathan sometimes whirs along in mercurially unconcerned fashion but at others groans or throws off slightly hellish sparks, grinding occasionally as it changes gears.” The final movement, Bump is a “nightmare conga.” Mr. Rouse also said of the final movement: “I make some insane demands … because there’s that bass drum every measure in the entire 8 ½ minutes … that’s your conga dance, and it’s rather extreme in terms of what it demands of the players. …. It’ll be a challenge, I’m sure, for the orchestra — and maybe for some people in the audience, too!” Artist-in-Residence Emanuel Ax to Perform Seeing for Piano and Orchestra The third orchestral program, June 20–22, 2013, will feature Artist-in-Residence Emanuel Ax, conducted by Mr. Gilbert, in Christopher Rouse’s Seeing for Piano and Orchestra, which was commissioned by the Philharmonic for Mr. Ax, who premiered it in 1999 under the baton of Leonard Slatkin; Mr. Ax and the Orchestra reprised the work in 2003 with David Zinman. Alan Gilbert said: “I think this is a very nice intersection of our two residencies — the Artist-in-Residence and the Composer-in-Residence. I heard Manny play this piece years ago, in Aspen, and I love it. I’ve been begging him to play it ever since then. It’s a perfect end to his residency — Seeing nicely balances out the other works he’s performing. And I also think it’s really important and gives a very strong message to be able to bring back a work that was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for Manny and composed by Christopher Rouse.” A non-traditional piano concerto, Seeing’s genesis lies in Robert Schumann’s piano concerto and the song “Seeing” by Moby Grape’s guitarist, Skip Spence; both Schumann and Spence suffered from psychosis. Mr. Rouse said: “This piece involves mental illness, so it had a kind of complicated gestation. The title, Seeing, comes from an actual rock song by Moby Grape that was composed by Skip Spence, and it was about his impending descent into schizophrenia, which was in its early stages — and indeed he did end up irretrievably psychotic and was institutionalized for the remainder of his life, or a lot of it anyway. There’s also Robert Schumann, who suffered from bipolar disorder, and there are references to the Schumann Piano Concerto. All of these things are mixed in to the work; in a general way, it’s seeing life through the eyes of someone who’s suffering from one of these conditions, so there is a strong programmatic element.” The program pairs Seeing with A Ring Journey, Mr. Gilbert’s arrangement of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. 4 Mr. Gilbert said: “Inasmuch as Chris Rouse really loves and admires Wagner, there is an emotional and dramatic connection between Chris’s music and that of Wagner. There’s a piece that Chris wrote called Garettete Alberich, which is a percussion concerto entirely based on music from the Ring. I think the pieces work very, very well together.” Mr. Rouse Also To Advise on CONTACT!, the New-Music Series To Include All-American Program With World, U.S., and New York Premieres Conducted by Alan Gilbert and Jayce Ogren in His New York Philharmonic Debut Christopher Rouse will advise on the 2012–13 installments of CONTACT!, the Orchestra’s new- music series. In its fourth season, the series will present two World Premieres, three U.S. Premieres, and two New York Premieres. Each of the two CONTACT! programs will be performed twice — once at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and once at Peter Norton Symphony Space. The first CONTACT! program, led by Jayce Ogren, with soprano Elizabeth Futral, on December 21–22, 2012, will include works by three young composers; it will feature two World Premiere– New York Philharmonic Commissions, by Andy Akiho (2012) and Jude Vaclavik (2012), and one New York Premiere — Andrew Norman’s Try (2011) — as well as the ensemble version of Counterpoise (1994) by the late Jacob Druckman, who served as the Philharmonic’s Composer- in-Residence from 1982 to 1986.