Alan Gilbert Leads NY Philharmonic's Memorial Day Concert

Music Director Alan Gilbert, The Yoko Nagae Ceschina Chair, will lead the New York  Philharmonic in Barber's Adagio for Strings and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica,  at the 20th Annual Free Memorial Day Concert, presented by the Anna-Maria and  Stephen Kellen Foundation, Monday, May 30, 2011, at 8:00 p.m. Seating is on a firstcome, first-served basis. The audio of the performance will be broadcast onto the  adjacent Pulpit Green, weather permitting.

This will be the first concert performed by the Philharmonic following its EUROPE /  SPRING 2011 tour to Central European capitals, May 12-24. Beethoven's Eroica  Symphony will be performed on the last concert on this tour - in Prague, Czech  Republic.

Samuel Barber, although not generally regarded an innovator, nevertheless produced  music with a very personal stamp, and won many awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes  and three Guggenheim fellowships. "I write what I feel," he said near the end of his life.

"I'm not a self-conscious composer ... it is said I have no style at all but that doesn't  matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage." In  1938 Barber adapted the intensely moving, elegiac Adagio for Strings from the slow  movement of his own String Quartet of 1936. The orchestral Adagio for Strings was  premiered in a radio broadcast by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in  1938. It was first performed by the New York Philharmonic in January 1940 under Sir  John Barbirolli, and most recently, on Memorial Day in 2009, conducted by David  Robertson.

Seeing Napoleon as the liberator of the downtrodden, Ludwig van Beethoven originally  titled his Symphony No. 3 "Bonaparte." However, when Napoleon crowned himself the  Emperor of France, Beethoven, disgusted, changed the title to "A Heroic Symphony  Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man," leading to its familiar nickname,  Eroica. It was then dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz, at whose home Beethoven conducted  it in a private performance prior to the public premiere at the Theater an der Wien on  April 7, 1805. The Eroica Symphony, in which Beethoven perfected the new "symphonic  ideal," was a turning point in the history of modern music. In the words of New York  Philharmonic Program Annotator James M. Keller, "After Beethoven's Third there was no turning back for symphonists." The New York Philharmonic gave the U.S. premiere  of the Symphony No. 3 on February 18, 1843, with Ureli Corelli Hill conducting. It was  performed most recently in November 2009, led by Riccardo Muti, and is scheduled to be  performed on May 4, 6 and 7, as well as on the EUROPE / SPRING 2011 tour, conducted  by Alan Gilbert.

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