Alan Gilbert: summer 2010
Following his enormously successful inaugural season as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert will give concerts on three continents this summer, including performances with the New York Philharmonic in New York City and in Vail, Colorado, and concerts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and in Copenhagen, Denmark. Gilbert also returns to Asia for the 2010 Music Masters Course Japan, which will feature concerts in Suntory Hall and Minato-Mirai Hall.
Gilbert’s first summer concert with the New York Philharmonic will take place in Avery Fisher Hall on Tuesday, July 20. This all-Varèse concert, the second part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s two-day presentation of the complete works of the French-born composer Edgard Varèse, will feature Gilbert and the Philharmonic performing six orchestral pieces including the seminal – and infamous – Amériques (1929). Varèse’s experiments with new instruments, complex rhythms, and electronic sounds made him one of the 20th century’s greatest musical pioneers. Details of the program follow below; additional information about “Varèse: (R)evolution” can be found at the Lincoln Center Festival website: new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/lcf-2010-varese.
Soon after, Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic head out to their summer home – Vail, Colorado – where they will perform three programs. Highlights include Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with Jonathan Biss (July 23); a program of Mozart (Symphony No. 25), Mendelssohn (Violin Concerto with Nikolaj Znaider), Schubert (“Unfinished” Symphony), and Wagner (Prelude and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde) (July 24); and an all-Russian program featuring the orchestra’s principal cellist, Carter Brey, in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, as well as Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 (July 25).
Later this summer, Gilbert will conduct Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra in four concerts, including the closing events of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival; Gilbert has been principal guest conductor of the NDRSO since 2004. Contributing to the worldwide celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth, the program will feature the Austrian composer’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) with tenor Peter Seiffert and baritone Thomas Hampson (see dates and cities below). Hampson has been a frequent collaborator with Gilbert and the orchestra this season, with performances by the baritone at home and abroad as the Philharmonic’s first Artist-in-Residence. Two of their appearances together – an account of John Adams’s The Wound Dresser and a live New Year’s Eve concert featuring music by Aaron Copland and Cole Porter – are available for download at major online music stores. Many of Gilbert’s performances with the orchestra this past season can be heard via download through the special iTunes pass, Alan Gilbert: The Inaugural Season.
Alan Gilbert is currently at the 2010 Music Masters Course Japan (MMCJ), which takes place in Kazusa, a scientific research center located an hour from Tokyo. MMCJ is a chamber music festival and school co-founded by Gilbert in the early 1990s, when the initial program, “Music from Curtis,” brought students and faculty over to Japan for cross-cultural music making. Today the festival features faculty drawn from the world’s leading orchestras – including the Vienna Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic – who work and perform with students from Japan and around the world. While most of the coaching and performances focus intensely on chamber music, the students – who pay no tuition and whose travel and housing expenses are covered – also gain orchestral experience playing alongside the remarkable roster of world-class musicians. This year’s program will feature study and rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1, Mozart’s Symphony No. 36, “Linz,” and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, culminating in concerts at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall (July 12) and Yokohama’s Minato-Mirai Hall (July 13).
Alan Gilbert’s second season as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic begins on September 22, 2010 with a gala concert, broadcast nationally on PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center. The program will showcase the U.S. premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Swing Symphony, which was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and London’s Barbican Centre.
Alan Gilbert – engagements, summer 2010
July 7–13
Music Masters Course Japan (Kazusa, Japan)
Mozart: Symphony No. 36, “Linz”
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
Concerts at Suntory Hall, Tokyo (July 12) and Minato-Mirai Hall, Yokohama (July 13)
July 20
New York Philharmonic
Lincoln Center Festival: “Varèse: (R)evolution”
All-Varèse program: Ionisation; Octandre; Tuning Up; Arcana; Nocturnal; Amériques
Avery Fisher Hall, New York City
July 23–25
New York Philharmonic
Vail, Colorado
August 28–30, September 1
Tour with NDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg
Programs include Mahler’s Song of the Earth with Thomas Hampson and Peter Seiffert at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Lübeck, Germany (Aug 28) and Kiel, Germany (Aug 29) as well as Hamburg, Germany (Aug 30) and Copenhagen, Denmark (Sept 1).
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© 21C Media Group, July 2010