NY Philharmonic Announces Details of Opening Day & Gala Opening Night Concert 9/16

Alan Gilbert will become the 25th music director of the New York Philharmonic when he conducts the Opening Night Gala Concert of the Orchestra's 168th season, Wednesday, September 16, 2009, at 7:30 p.m. The Opening Night Gala Concert will be projected live onto to Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza at 7:30 p.m., and broadcast nationally on a tape-delayed basis on Live From Lincoln Center at 8:00 p.m. [check local listings]. Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin will host the broadcast, which will be simulcast on 96.3 FM WQXR.

The Philharmonic and its Global Sponsor, Credit Suisse, will offer a free dress rehearsal that day at 9:45 a.m., with Mr. Gilbert conducting the evening's program: EXPO, a World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commission by Magnus Lindberg, the Orchestra's new Composer-in-Residence; Messiaen's song cycle, Poèmes pour Mi, performed by soprano Renée Fleming; and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

The free dress rehearsal is offered to the public, for the third consecutive year, by the New York Philharmonic and its Global Sponsor, Credit Suisse. General admission tickets will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis, starting at 8:00 that morning, on Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza. The previous seasons' free dress rehearsals drew thousands of music lovers to Avery Fisher Hall.

The black-tie Opening Night Gala will include a pre-concert reception from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.; the concert; and a dinner immediately following the concert. Opening Night Gala Chairmen are Alec Baldwin, Paul Calello, and Gary W. Parr. The Executive Vice Chairman is Gerald L. Hassell. The Gala is generously underwritten by The Bank of New York Mellon, Credit Suisse, and Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert.

Artists
Alan Gilbert will begin his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in the 2009-10 season, the first native New Yorker to hold the post. For his inaugural season he has introduced a number of new initiatives: Composer-in-Residence Magnus Lindberg; Artist-in-Residence Thomas Hampson; an annual three-week festival; and CONTACT, the New York Philharmonic's new-music series. He will also lead the Orchestra on a major tour of Asia in October 2009, with debuts in Hanoi and Abu Dhabi; a European tour in January 2010; and performances of world, U.S., and New York premieres. Also in the 2009-10 season Mr. Gilbert becomes the first to hold the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at The Juilliard School, a position that will include coaching, conducting, and performance master classes.

Highlights of Mr. Gilbert's 2008-09 season with the New York Philharmonic included the November 14, 2008, Bernstein anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, and a performance with the Juilliard Orchestra, presented by the Philharmonic, featuring Bernstein's Symphony No. 3, Kaddish. In May 2009 he conducted the World Premiere of Peter Lieberson's The World in Flower, a New York Philharmonic Commission, and in July 2009 he led the New York Philharmonic Concerts in the Parks, Presented by Didi and Oscar Schafer, and two concerts at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado.

In June 2008 Mr. Gilbert was named conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, following his final concert as its chief conductor and artistic advisor. He has been principal guest conductor of Hamburg's NDR Symphony Orchestra (NDRSO) since 2004. Mr. Gilbert regularly conducts other leading orchestras in the U.S. and abroad, including the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphony orchestras; The Cleveland Orchestra; Munich's Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw; and Orchestre National de Lyon. In 2003 he was named the first music director of Santa Fe Opera.

Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Gilbert studied at Harvard University, The Curtis Institute, and The Juilliard School; he was a substitute violinist with The Philadelphia Orchestra for two seasons, and assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra from 1995 to 1997. In November 2008 he made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting John Adams's Dr. Atomic. His recording of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance.

Soprano Renée Fleming performs on the world's greatest opera stages and concert halls, now extending her reach to include other mediums. Over the past few seasons, she has begun hosting a wide variety of television and radio broadcasts, including The Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD series for movie theaters and television, and Live From Lincoln Center on PBS.

Renée Fleming has been sought after for numerous distinguished occasions, from the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to performances in Beijing during the 2008 Olympic Games. In 2008 a precedent was broken when she became the first woman in the 125-year history of The Metropolitan Opera to headline an opening night gala. On January 18, 2009, she performed on the televised concert, We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, for President Obama. She has performed for the United States Supreme Court, HRH The Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace, and will celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic at the invitation of Vaclav Havel.

Renée Fleming's 2009-10 operatic season at The Metropolitan Opera includes performances of R. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and a new production of Rossini's Armida. She also appears at the Vienna Staatsoper in performances of R. Strauss's Capriccio, and at the Zurich Opera in Verdi's La traviata and Der Rosenkavalier. In concert, she appears on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Opening Night Gala, a European tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and in recitals in Baden-Baden, Vienna, Vancouver, Seattle, Baltimore, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. She has just released a recording for Decca entitled Verismo.

Repertoire
EXPO is a World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commission by Magnus Lindberg, the New York Philharmonic's 2009-10 Composer-in-Residence. Born in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Lindberg is noted for his richly intricate works for orchestra, and has been in the forefront of orchestral composition over the past decade, including the concert-opener Feria (1997); large-scale statements such as Fresco (1997), Cantigas (1999), Concerto for Orchestra (2002-03), and Sculpture (2005); and concertos for cello (1999), clarinet (2002), and violin (2006). He is also a pianist and percussionist. Of EXPO, he says: "The title is self-explanatory; it's the exposition of Alan [Gilbert's] season. I work with extremely strong contrasts between super-fast and super-slow music,and then a strange amalgam between these poles. It's a piece built on qualities I find so gorgeous in Alan's way of making music: absolute technical and physical straightness - no mystery around the rational part of it - and then on top of that the highly irrational and mysterious part of how you actually put music together."

In 1932 Olivier Messiaen married Claire Delbos, a composer and violinist. Messiaen's pet name for his wife was "Mi" - the solfège syllable used in France to denote the note "E," the pitch of the highest string on the violin, Delbos's instrument. Messiaen's passionate song cycle Poèmes pour Mi ("Poems for ‘Mi'"), composed in 1936 and orchestrated in 1937, is a devotional celebration of love and marriage. The texts, by the composer, are both universal and intensely personal, and the music is characteristically diverse, incorporating moments of abstract complexity as well as rapturous tonality. The cycle is a glorious and moving example of Messiaen's unique art. This will be the first New York Philharmonic performance of the work.

Hector Berlioz, disappointed in his infatuation with an actress he had admired from afar (and whom he would, in fact, eventually marry), poured into five movements a Faustian tale depicting the tortured, opium-induced dreams of a young man, which unhappily ends with a trip to the gallows and infernal horrors. The resulting Symphonie fantastique was composed in 1830, only three years after the death of Beethoven, but it was decades ahead of its time in terms of harmonic language, orchestration, descriptive ideas, and melodic treatment. The New York Philharmonic's January 1866 performance of the work, led by Carl Bergmann, was the first of seven American premieres of Berlioz works the Orchestra would ultimately present. It was last performed in July 2009, at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, led by Alan Gilbert.Single tickets for the 2009-10 season go on sale August 23. Single tickets for the Opening Night concert are $71 to $242. All tickets may be purchased online at nyphil.org or by calling (212) 875-5656, 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. Tickets may also be purchased at the Avery Fisher Hall Box Office, Lincoln Center, Broadway at 65th Street. The Box Office opens at 10:00 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and at noon on Sunday. On performance evenings the Box Office closes one-half hour after performance time; other evenings it closes at 6:00 p.m. To determine ticket availability, call the Philharmonic's Customer Relations Department at (212) 875-5656. [Ticket prices subject to change.]