Contact: Katherine E. Johnson (212) 875-5718; [email protected] National Press Representative: Julia Kirchhausen (917) 453-8386; [email protected] UPDATED May 23, 2014 JUNE 2 AND 4, 2014, AT THE DAVID RUBENSTEIN ATRIUM AT LINCOLN CENTER: INSIGHTS SERIES Panel Discussions with Alan Gilbert, Composers, and Curators “WHAT IS A BIENNIAL?” To Feature Music Director ALAN GILBERT and CURATORS from the WHITNEY BIENNIAL, VENICE BIENNALE, and UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL, June 2, 2014 “21ST-CENTURY LANDMARKS” To Feature COMPOSERS from Across the Musical Spectrum, June 4, 2014 As part of the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will co-present two free discussions related to the NY PHIL BIENNIAL as part of the Philharmonic’s Insights Series. Music Director Alan Gilbert will join Massimiliano Gioni, director of the 2013 Venice Biennale; Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the 2012 Whitney Biennial; and Meiyin Wang, co-director of the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater to explore the nature, essence, and impact of biennials. Theodore Wiprud, New York Philharmonic Vice President, Education, will moderate the discussion, “What Is a Biennial?” on June 2, 2014, at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. A panel of composers from across the musical spectrum, some of whose music will be featured during the NY PHIL BIENNIAL — The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence Christopher Rouse; composer/conductor Matthias Pintscher; Kravis Emerging Composer Sean Shepherd; composer Julia Wolfe; and composer and senior editor of NewMusicBox Frank J. Oteri — will discuss what they consider to be this century’s emerging masterworks. Carol J. Oja, The Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, will moderate the discussion, “21st-Century Landmarks,” June 4, 2014, at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. 2 An integral part of the NY PHIL BIENNIAL experience will be interaction among artists, composers, and audiences, and the Insights panels are among the events created by the New York Philharmonic to engender an ongoing dialogue. A flagship project of the New York Philharmonic envisioned by Music Director Alan Gilbert, the NY PHIL BIENNIAL is a kaleidoscopic exploration of today’s music showcasing an array of curatorial voices through concerts presented with cultural partners throughout New York City. Modeled on the great visual art biennials, the inaugural NY PHIL BIENNIAL, taking place May 28–June 7, 2014, brings the public together with a diverse roster of more than 50 composers, ranging from elementary school students to icons, for concerts of symphonies, concertos, staged opera, chamber music, and solo works, many of which will be premieres. Meet-up events, lectures and panel discussions, and online interactivity are planned to encourage audience members to directly engage with composers, scholars, and artists. The 2014 NY PHIL BIENNIAL partners include 92nd Street Y, The Museum of Modern Art, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Juilliard School, Gotham Chamber Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Bang on a Can, American Composers Orchestra, and Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School High School. For complete information about the 2014 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, see press release. Insights Series Participants “What Is a Biennial?” Music Director Alan Gilbert began his New York Philharmonic tenure in September 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 and The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in- Residence; CONTACT!, the new-music series; and, beginning in the spring of 2014, the NY PHIL BIENNIAL. “He is building a legacy that matters and is helping to change the template for what an American orchestra can be,” The New York Times acclaimed. In addition to inaugurating the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, in the 2013–14 season Alan Gilbert conducts Mozart’s three final symphonies; the U.S. Premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Frieze coupled with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; world premieres; an all-Britten program celebrating the composer’s centennial; the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey as the film was screened; and a staged production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson. He continues The Nielsen Project — the multi-year initiative to perform and record the Danish composer’s symphonies and concertos, the first release of which was named by The New York Times as among the Best Classical Music Recordings of 2012 — and presides over the ASIA / WINTER 2014 tour. Last season’s highlights included Bach’s B-minor Mass; Ives’s Fourth Symphony; the EUROPE / SPRING 2013 tour; and the season-concluding A Dancer’s Dream, a multidisciplinary reimagining of Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss and Petrushka, created by Giants Are Small and starring New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns. Mr. Gilbert is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies and holds the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at The Juilliard School. Conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra, he regularly conducts leading orchestras around the world. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan 3 Opera debut conducting John Adams’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. In May 2010 Mr. Gilbert received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Curtis Institute of Music and in December 2011, Columbia University’s Ditson Conductor’s Award for his “exceptional commitment to the performance of works by American composers and to contemporary music.” Massimiliano Gioni is the associate director of the New Museum in New York and the artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. In 2013 he directed the 55th Venice Biennale; then 39 years old, he was the youngest director in its 118-year history. He has collaborated with many institutions, museums, and biennials worldwide and cultivated independent initiatives such as the non-for-profit spaces The Wrong Gallery and Family Business and the independent magazines Charley and the Wrong Times. Mr. Gioni directed the Eighth Gwangju Biennial (in 2010), organized Of Mice and Men – The Fourth Berlin Biennial (2006), co-curated the fifth edition of the itinerant European biennial Manifesta (San Sebastian, Spain, 2004), and curated The Zone for the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale (2003). He directs the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, a nomadic museum that has produced solo exhibitions, special projects, and interventions in abandoned buildings, public spaces, and forgotten monuments of the city of Milan. The exhibitions he curated at the New Museum include the inaugural cycle of exhibitions Unmonumental (co-curated with Richard Flood and Laura Hoptman), the first American museum presentations of the work of, among others, Pawel Althamer, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Urs Fischer, Camille Henrot, Carsten Höller, and Klara Liden; in 2009 he initiated the New Museum Triennial and co-curated its inaugural edition titled The Generational: Younger than Jesus. Massimiliano Gioni’s group shows have become a signature feature of the New Museum program. His thematic exhibitions such as After Nature, Ostalgia, and Ghosts in the Machine have been praised for the breadth of their research. Elisabeth Sussman is curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, along with co-curator Jay Sanders, she curated the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Exhibitions on which she has collaborated include Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (co-curated by Lynn Zelevansky, recipient of the AICA award for best monographic show in New York, 2011), William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 (co-curated by Thomas Weski), and Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” (2007, recipient of the AICA award for best monographic show in New York). Other Whitney exhibitions she has organized include Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing (2005); Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993); Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996, with David Armstrong); Keith Haring (1997); and the 1993 Biennial Exhibition. She has co-curated exhibitions of Eva Hesse at New York’s The Drawing Center (featuring her drawings) and The Jewish Museum (sculpture). For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ms. Sussman co-organized, with Renate Petzinger, a full retrospective on Hesse’s work (AICA’s First Prize for the best monographic exhibition outside of New York, 2001 and 2002), with Sandra Phillips, Diane Arbus: Revelation (the catalogue for which received the 2004 Infinity Award for Publication of the International Center of Photography). Elisabeth Sussman was a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1999, and a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2003. She is the author of 4 many publications, including Lisette Model (Phaidon, 2001), and contributed essays on Robert Gober for the Schaulager and Lee Bontecou for an exhibition catalogue. Before coming to the Whitney, Elisabeth Sussman served as interim director (1991), deputy director for programs (1989–91) at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA),