NY Philharmonic Launches CONTACT! Series 12/17 At Symphony Space, 12/19 At The Metropolitain Museum Of Art

The New York Philharmonic will launch its new music series, CONTACT! - an initiative created by Music Director Alan Gilbert - with two concerts of World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commissions by emerging and established contemporary composers, Thursday, December 17, 2009, at 8:00 p.m. at Symphony Space, and Saturday, December 19 at 7:00 p.m. at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Conducted and hosted by Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic's Marie-Jose?e Kravis Composer-in-Residence, the concerts will feature works by Marc-Andre? Dalbavie, Arthur Kampela, Lei Liang, and Arlene Sierra, performed by New York Philharmonic musicians. Mr. Lindberg will introduce each work through discussion with its composer prior to its complete performance. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tickets to the concert will include admission to the museum on the day of performance.

The works, which were created specially for these concerts, are Marc-Andre? Dalbavie's Melodia - a piece where noise evolves into melody; Arthur Kampela's MACUNAI?MA - based on a book about a Brazilian mythic hero; Lei Liang's Verge - inspired by the birth of his son; and Arlene Sierra's Game of Attrition - inspired by evolution, natural selection, and power struggles. The pieces are scored for between 15 and 20 musicians, with instrumentation varying from work to work. Mr. Dalbavie's piece, for example, utilizes 12 players that include winds, horns, percussion, and strings. Mr. Kampela's piece is for 20 players, with five off-stage. Mr. Liang employs 18 strings, while Ms. Sierra uses 20 instruments, including winds, brass, percussion, harp, keyboard, and strings.

Alan Gilbert will conduct the next CONTACT! concerts, which take place on April 16, 2010, at Symphony Space and on April 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and showcasing World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commissions by Nico Muhly, Sean Shepherd, and Matthias Pintscher. Baritone Thomas Hampson, The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, will perform Mr. Pintscher's new work.

Alan Gilbert, commenting on the launch of the new series, said: "There was an enormous amount of enthusiasm for new music on the part of the musicians of the Orchestra, and I wanted to bring their excitement and enthusiasm into the New York Philharmonic fold. The notion of creating an ensemble that was dedicated to the performance of new music seemed inevitable."

Magnus Lindberg, who curates the concerts in conjunction with Mr. Gilbert, noted: "I think what is very beautiful and interesting is that we'll have the young generation of composers with us. Connecting young composers to the seasons of big orchestras is absolutely essential." In choosing the composers for the new series, he indicated that "a decisive criterion for me is the personality of the music. There must be personality in creation today."

Host and Conductor
Magnus Lindberg, The Marie-Jose?e Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, was born in Helsinki in 1958. Following piano studies, he entered the Sibelius Academy where his composition teachers included Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen. The latter encouraged his pupils to look beyond the prevailing Finnish conservative and nationalist aesthetics, and to explore the works of the European avant- garde. This led, around 1980, to the founding of the informal group known as the Ears Open Society, which included Mr. Lindberg and his contemporaries Eero Ha?meeniemi, Jouni Kaipainen, Kaija Saariaho, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and sought to encourage a greater awareness of mainstream modernism. Mr. Lindberg's compositional breakthrough came with two large-scale works, Action-Situation-Signification (1982) and Kraft (1983- 85), which were inextricably linked with his founding, with Mr. Salonen, of the experimental Toimii Ensemble. His compositions of the early 1980s combined experimentalism, complexity, and primitivism, and worked with extremes of musical material. Toward the end of that decade, his compositional style transformed into a new modernist classicism, in which many of the communicative ingredients of a vibrant musical language (harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, and melody) were reinterpreted afresh for the post-serial era. Magnus Lindberg is making his New York Philharmonic conducting debut in these CONTACT! concerts.

Composers
Marc-Andre? Dalbavie was born in 1961 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and studied at the Paris Conservatoire. As early as 1982 he, along with several other composers of his generation, started exploring the potential of "spectral music." In 1985 he joined the research department at L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. In the early 1990s he moved to Berlin at the invitation of the German Academy Austauschdienst. He held a two-year residency with The Cleveland Orchestra and a four-year residency with the Orchestre de Paris, and he has had major works commissioned by orchestras and organizations around the world. He is the recipient of the Prix de Rome, the Berlin Philharmonic Salzburger Osterfestspiele Prize, and the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres distinction by the French Ministry of Culture.

About Melodia:
"This is a piece for a little ensemble. Just flute, two clarinets, horn, a little percussion, and strings. All the strings are soloists. In writing it, I was working in a long tradition in contemporary music of writing for small ensemble, so while I've been doing a lot of symphonic work, this is like coming back to my roots. This piece is more about the color and melody. It starts with just noise - timbre. As we move through the piece the sound becomes more harmonic and the line becomes a melody. That's why it is called Melodia. It's about the idea of metamorphosis. It's very important to try to hear time as continuous even if there are moments that feel like rupture. The key is to find the moments of metamorphosis and transition." -Marc-Andre? Dalbvie

Arthur Kampela was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is both a composer and a virtuoso guitar player who fuses popular and vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques and experiments with extended techniques for acoustic instruments. He has received numerous commissions and awards, including from the Rio-Arte Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, New Music Consort, Carioca Guitar Quartet, and the Helsinki Biennial. He participated in the "Sonidos de las Americas" at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra; the 43rd International Tribune of Composers of UNESCO; the festival "Synthese' 94" in Bourges, France; and at the electro-acoustic music festival in Aquila, Italy, with his piece, Textorias for computer-generated guitar. In 1998 Mr. Kampela received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where he studied with Mario Davidovsky, Fred Lerdahl, and Brian Ferneyhough.

About MACUNAI?MA:
"It's based on a book by Mario de Andrade, who was a leader of the modernist movement in Brazil, which was trying to create a new idiom combining many aspects of Brazilian folklore with industrial society. For me, MACUNAI?MA is a character who questions everything: if he heard a subway passing he wouldn't consider it an annoyance; he would consider it a rhythm to dance to. When you see an orchestra on stage and you have certain expectations. They are sitting there in order ... it's a big ritual. My job is to wake the hearer with surprises, with things he did not expect to hear from that monument. This is a work of new music and invention. The audience is not going to hear a style - minimalism or spectralism. They will hear a lot of fun rhythms, interactions, harmonies, and melodies. I will take that sound that is characteristic of the orchestra and turn it into a huge percussive instrument." -Arthur Kampela

In the aftermath of China's Tiananmen Square protests, Lei Liang (b. 1972) emigrated to the U.S. at age 17. He studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, Joshua Fineberg, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. Lei Liang's stage and chamber works have been performed throughout the world; as a scholar, he is active in the preservation and research of traditional Asian music. He is currently assistant professor of music at the University of California-San Diego.

About Verge:
"I started writing the piece at a very exciting time of my life, just before my son was born. I finished one month after he was born, so I was composing between diaper changes. I didn't realize how energizing diaper changing can be! His name is Albert; translated into music musical notation it asserts itself in different configurations as the basic melodic material. It's a very personal piece; a way to make a musical amulet and put all my wishes for this little boy into this piece. My wife is a Japanese harpsichordist and her name, Take Ohnishi, is also in the piece. Their names blend together. I want Albert to know that his life is marked by his mother's love. There are sections that are very slow and intensely waiting. And there are moments of great excitement, which I mark ‘with wild energy.' I know the child will face challenges and I want him not to give up, to be determined, not to waver. The piece was composed on the verge of this moment, but on a more technical level I have always been fascinated by the music of Mongolia in which there is always a principal line and an accompaniment. Sometimes the principal line is in the foreground, sometimes the background line comes to the foreground and that is the phenomenon of convergence and divergence." -Lei Liang

Arlene Sierra (b. 1970) began piano studies at the age of five and took her first composition class at Oberlin College-Conservatory. After completing graduate studies at the Yale School of Music and the University of Michigan, she settled in London and began professional life in the U.K. with fellowships at Dartington, where she studied with Judith Weir, and at the Britten-Pears School at Aldeburgh, where she worked with Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews, and Magnus Lindberg. Her first orchestral work, Aquilo, won the 2001 Takemitsu Prize and was performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic and broadcast on NHK Radio. Ms. Sierra is currently a lecturer in composition at Cardiff University School of Music.

About Game of Attrition:
"The piece is for 20 players, about half strings, the other half, winds and brass with percussion and piano. It is a series of competitive duos, with a final section that is the strings versus the brass. It's rather mean to the trumpet because he has to blow a high C until he can't hold out anymore and the strings win. When writing this piece I was thinking about Darwin - evolution and natural selection. I moved to London and here he's unavoidable; Darwin is everywhere - his picture is even on the money! I'm interested in military strategy, but Sun Tzu [who inspired a series of Ms. Sierra's works] wrote and thought a lot about how to avoid violence. There are also games of attrition in nature, the goal of which is to show power, and scare your opponents without killing them. That is of interest to me." -Arlene Sierra