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By Ben Mattison
21 Sep 2005
The New York Philharmonic opens its season tonight with a gala performance conducted by music director Lorin Maazel and featuring pianist Evgeny Kissin.
The program includes Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor") and Strauss's Don Juan and Der Rosenkavalier Suite. PBS's Live From Lincoln Center originally planned to broadcast tonight's concert, but will instead carry the orchestra's first subscription concert tomorrow night. That concert features pianist Lang Lang.
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| New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel |
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| photo by Stephanie Berger |
The Philharmonic's 2005-06 season includes commissioned world-premiere works by John Harbison and Peter Lieberson, a European tour, and a two-week Mozart festival.
Harbison’s Milosz Songs for Soprano and Orchestra is set to poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, who died last year. The world premiere, scheduled for February 23, 2006, will feature soprano Dawn Upshaw and will be conducted by Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony. Maazel will conduct the debut on May 24 of Lieberson’s The World in Flower, which will feature the composer’s spouse, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; bass-baritone Gerald Finley; and the New York Choral Artists.
The Philharmonic has just completed the first half of a two-part tour to Europe; the second part, scheduled for November 10-20, will include a stop in Dresden, where the orchestra will perform the world premiere of Colin Matthew’s Berceuse for Dresden. The work, which will receive its American premiere from the Philharmonic on November 25, commemorates the firebombing that destroyed the German city during World War II.
Maazel will conduct 13 of the Philharmonic’s 32 weeks of concerts as well the Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve Gala, an "evening of Italian opera" starring soprano Angela Gheorghiu in her Philharmonic debut.
The Philharmonic’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, to run from January 28 through February 14, 2006, will include five symphonies, the "Coronation" Mass, and two piano concertos, led from the piano by Jeffrey Kahane.
Other highlights of the season include the New York premiere of John Corigliano’s Red Violin Violin Concerto, the latest in a series of pieces that the composer has extracted from his score for the 1999 film. Violinist Joshua Bell, who performed on the film’s soundtrack, is the soloist. The orchestra will perform four works by Elliott Carter over the course of the season, three of them conducted by Maazel.
Among the guest conductors on the schedule are former music director Kurt Masur, Charles Dutoit, Mstislav Rostropovich, Colin Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Marin Alsop, and Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, leading the Philharmonic for the first time since 1970. Soloists include violinists Sarah Chang, Midori, Gil Shaham, and Maxim Vengerov; cellist Yo-Yo Ma; and pianists Lang Lang, Mitsuko Uchida, and André Watts.
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