Alan Gilbert to Lead NY Phil in Annual Free Memorial Day Concert, 5/25

Music Director Alan Gilbert will lead the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 at the Annual Free Memorial Day Concert, Monday, May 25, 2015, at 8:00 p.m. at The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. This will be the 24th Annual Free Memorial Day Concert offered by the New York Philharmonic, a tradition begun in 1992 as a gift to the people of New York City. Alan Gilbert has led the Annual Free Memorial Day Concert each year since becoming Music Director in the 2009-10 season. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the performance; ticket distribution will begin at 6:00 p.m. The audio of the performance will be broadcast onto the adjacent Pulpit Green, weather permitting. The program will be presented without intermission.

Artists
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-Jose?e Kravis Composer-in-Residence, The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in- Residence, and the Artist-in-Association; CONTACT!, the new-music series; and the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, an exploration of today's music by a wide range of contemporary and modern composers inaugurated in spring 2014. As New York magazine wrote, "The Philharmonic and its music director Alan Gilbert have turned themselves into a force of permanent revolution."

In the 2014-15 season Alan Gilbert conducts the U.S. Premiere of Unsuk Chin's Clarinet Concerto, a Philharmonic co-commission, alongside Mahler's First Symphony; La Dolce Vita: The Music of Italian Cinema; Verdi's Requiem; a staging of Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, featuring Oscar winner Marion Cotillard; World Premieres; a CONTACT! program; and Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. He concludes 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 EUROPE / SPRING 2015 tour. His Philharmonic- tenure highlights include acclaimed productions of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, Jana?c?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson, and Philharmonic 360 at Park Avenue Armory; World Premieres by Magnus Lindberg, John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, and others; Bach's B-minor Mass and Ives's Fourth Symphony; the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey alongside the film; Mahler's Second Symphony, Resurrection, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11; and eight international tours.

Conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of Hamburg's NDR Symphony Orchestra, Alan Gilbert regularly conducts leading orchestras around the world. His 2014-15 appearances include the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, The Metropolitan Opera, and The Philadelphia Orchestra. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting John Adams's Doctor Atomic in 2008, the DVD of which received a Grammy Award. Rene?e Fleming's recent Decca recording Poe?mes, on which he conducted, received a 2013 Grammy Award. His recordings have received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone magazine. Mr. Gilbert is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at The Juilliard School, where he holds the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies. 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." In 2014 he was elected to The American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Repertoire
In 1809-10 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) composed incidental music for a new production of Goethe's 1787 play Egmont at Vienna's Burgtheater. Of the ten selections (some of which featured soprano, narrator, and orchestra), he wrote the Egmont Overture last - too late, in fact, for the first performance. Composed in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven expressed in the work his political beliefs through the story of the life and heroism of the Count of Egmont, a 16th-century Dutch nobleman who was condemned to death for taking a stand for justice and national liberty and against despotic oppression. In fact, more than 100 years later, the piece would become the unofficial anthem for the 1956 Hungarian revolution. When Goethe saw his work set to Beethoven's music, he noted, "Beethoven has followed my intentions with admirable genius." Similar in style to the Fifth Symphony, the Egmont Overture is one of Beethoven's last middle-period works. Musicians from the Philharmonic gave the Orchestra's first performance of the work in April 1843, under the direction of Ureli Corelli Hill; Alan Gilbert conducted its most recent performance, in May 2013.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) had a troubled relationship with the repressive Soviet regime, specifically with Stalin and his cultural henchmen. Upon hearing of Stalin's death in 1953, the composer began his Symphony No. 10, his first work in the genre in eight years; many see it as the release of his pent-up anger - "concentrated fury," as music commentator Phillip Huscher described it - that had lain buried for so long. Shostakovich himself said he was painting a portrait of the tyrant with demonic, loud, and violent music. It is tragic in nature, opening with dark, foreboding harmonies that slowly give way to a clarinet's plaintive song that emerges from the depths. The powerful finale employs pitches equivalent to Shostakovich's initials in German notation - D-S-C-H - as an embedded code, and, in the struggle between the motif symbolizing Stalin and the composer's musical signature, the latter crushes the former. Dmitr Mitropoulos conducted the Philharmonic in the work's U.S. Premiere at Carnegie Hall in October 1954; Alan Gilbert will have led the Orchestra's most recent performance in April 2015, including on the EUROPE / SPRING 2015 tour.

Admission to this performance is free. Tickets are required and will be distributed at 6:00 p.m. the evening of the concert. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the performance.

For press tickets, call Lanore Carr in the New York Philharmonic Marketing and Communications Department at (212) 875-5714, or e-mail her at carrl@nyphil.org.