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Philharmonic returns to Van Cortlandt Park with a varied program of romantic music The full orchestra will perform outdoors on Tuesday, July 15 at 8 p.m. The concert site is at the east side of the Parade Ground. Enter the park at Broadway and West 246th Street. PROGRAM The Composer
The Composer
The Composer
The Composer
Carl August Nielsen
Max Christian Friedrich Bruch
Edvard Grieg
Franz Liszt
Carl August Nielsen (June 9, 1865 – October 3, 1931) is widely recognized as Denmark’s greatest composer, and is also recognized as a skilled conductor and a violinist. Brought up by poor but musically talented parents, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. Nielsen is especially admired for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera, Maskarade, and a considerable number of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundredkroner banknote.
Max Christian Friedrich Bruch (January 6, 1838 – October 2, 1920), was a German Romantic composer and conductor who wrote over 200 works, including three violin concertos, the first of which has become a staple of the violin repertory. Bruch was born in Cologne, where he received his early musical training. At the age of nine he wrote his first composition, a song for his mother’s birthday. From then on, music was his passion, his studies having been enthusiastically supported by his parents. Bruch had a long career as a teacher, conductor and composer, moving among musical posts.
Edvard Hagerup Grieg (June 15, 1843 – September 4, 1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvorák did in Finland and Bohemia respectively. Grieg composed the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt, which includes the famous excerpt entitled, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886), was a 19th century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, teacher and Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age, and he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. Liszt was also a well-known and influential composer, piano teacher and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin. As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the “Neudeutsche Schule” (“New German School.”) He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony.
The music
The music
The music
Maskarade Overture Violin Concerto No. 1 Maskarade (Masquerade) is an opera in three acts by Carl Nielsen to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. It was first performed in 1906. The overture is one of Nielsen’s most widely performed works at concerts in Europe and North America. The first performance was at Det Kongelige Teater, Copenhagen, 11 November 1906. The United States premiere was conducted by Igor Buketoff, with St. Paul Opera in Minnesota, and the first reported New York performance was by the Bronx Opera Company in 1983. Maskarade has become the Danish national opera. The masquerade of the title is a place where the characters can leave behind the oppressed lives they lead in a rigid society; it represents liberty and the Enlightenment, and even more, perhaps, a sense of joie de vivre in a land where weather (and duty) is often cold and gloomy.
Selections from Peer Gynt
Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, is one of the most popular violin concertos in the repertory. It continues to be performed and recorded by many violinists and is arguably Bruch’s most famous composition, with his Kol Nidrei being the other leading candidate for that distinction. The first movement is unusual in that it is a Vorspiel, a prelude, to the second movement and is directly linked to it. The slow second movement is often adored for its powerful melody, and is generally considered to be the heart of the concerto. The third movement, the finale, opens with an extremely intense, yet quiet, orchestral introduction that yields to the soloist’s statement of the exuberant theme in brilliant double stops. It is very much like a dance that moves at a comfortably fast and energetic tempo.
Peer Gynt, Op. 23 is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play of the same name, written by Edvard Grieg in 1875. It premiered along with the play on February 24, 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo). In this piece, the adventures of the anti-hero, Peer Gynt, are related, including the episode in which he steals a bride at her wedding. The angry guests chase him, and Peer falls, hitting his head on a rock. He wakes up in a mountain surrounded by trolls. The music of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” represents the angry trolls taunting Peer, and gets louder each time the theme repeats. The music ends with Peer escaping from the mountain. Later, in 1888 and 1891, Grieg extracted eight movements to make two four-movement suites: Suite No. 1, Op. 46, and Suite No. 2, Op. 55.
The music Les Préludes Les préludes is the third of Franz Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems. Among Liszt’s symphonic poems, Les préludes is the most popular. During World War II, the fanfare motif of the march finale was made the signature tune for the Wehrmachtbericht radio report and Die Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel.
ARTISTS Alan Gilbert Conductor New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert began his tenure in September 2009. The first native New Yorker to hold the post, he has sought to make the orchestra a point of pride for the city and country.
Mr. Gilbert studied at Harvard University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Juilliard and was assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra (1995– 97). In May 2010, he received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Curtis, and in December 2011 he received Columbia University’s Ditson Conductor’s Award for his “exceptional commitment to the performance of works by American composers and to contemporary music.” In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Joshua Bell Violin Violinist Joshua Bell is equally at home as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestra leader. In the 2013–2014 season, he will tour with the Academy of St Martin-in-theFields, where he was recently named music director — the first person to
hold this post since Sir Neville Mariner formed the orchestra in 1958. As a soloist, chamber musician and conductor, Mr. Bell has recorded more than 40 CDs, garnering many awards. Joshua Bell’s 2007 incognito subway station performance in Washington, D.C., resulted in a provocative Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning story examining art and context. The conversation continues with the new Annick Press illustrated children’s book, The Man with the Violin. Source: New York Philharmonic and Wikipedia.com
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