Thomas Hampson to Make Debut as NY Philharmonic's Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence 11/5, 11/7, 11/10
By: Gabrielle Sierra Oct. 29, 2009
Baritone Thomas Hampson will give his first performances as the New York Philharmonic's Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence when he joins the Orchestra, led by Neeme Järvi, for performances of Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, Thursday, November 5, 2009, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, November 6, at 8:00 p.m., Saturday, November 7, at 8:00 p.m., and Tuesday, November 10, at 7:30 p.m. Performing with him in the symphony will be the soprano Hillevi Martinpelto, who is making her New York Philharmonic debut.
The program will also include Beethoven's Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, and Mozart's Symphony No. 38, Prague.
Mr. Hampson - who is also this season's Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic - will present the first of three "Listening to Thought" lecture/demonstrations, which explore the interplay of verbal and musical languages in vocal music, on Monday, November 2, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. This first event, titled "Listening to Thought: Vienna's Paradigm Shift," will focus on experimentation and change in Vienna between the wars, and will include a discussion of Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony.
Related Events
Pre-Concert TalkComposer/conductor Victoria Bond will introduce the program one hour before each
performance. Tickets are $5 in addition to the concert ticket. Attendance is limited to 90 people. Information: nyphil.org or (212) 875-5656
New York Philharmonic Podcast
The producers and hosts of the award-winning New York Philharmonic Podcast are
Elliott Forrest, Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and producer, and Mark Travis, a producer for the WFMT Radio Network since 1999 and the producer of the 52-week-per-year nationally syndicated radio series, The New York Philharmonic This Week. These previews of upcoming programs - through musical selections as well as interviews with guest artists, conductors, and Orchestra musicians - are available at nyphil.org/podcast or from iTunes.
This concert will be broadcast the week of November 16, 2009,* on The New York Philharmonic This Week, a radio concert series syndicated nationally to more than 295 stations by the WFMT Radio Network. The 52-week series, hosted by Emmy Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin, is generously underwritten by The Kaplen Foundation, the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Philharmonic's corporate partner, MetLife Foundation. The broadcast will be available on the Philharmonic's Website, nyphil.org. The program is broadcast locally in the New York metropolitan area on 105.9 FM WQXR on Thursdays at 9:00 p.m.
*Check local listings for broadcast and program information.
Artists
Neeme Järvi, chief conductor of the Residentie Orkest of the Hague and conductor laureate and artistic advisor of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, will take over, in 2010, of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, where he began his career in 1963 before fleeing Estonia, a former Soviet republic. Mr. Järvi makes frequent guest appearances with some of the foremost orchestras in the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestra de Paris, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the major orchestras of Scandinavia. In the United States he regularly conducts the Chicago and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, Philadelphia Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra.
In the 2009-10 season Mr. Järvi will open the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra's season, and return to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Göteborgs Symphony, and London Philharmonic Orchestra. He will tour China with Residentie Orkest of the Hague, and later lead the Shanghai Symphony and China Philharmonic Orchestras.
Neeme Järvi, who has a discography of more than 400 releases along with many accolades and awards, is music director emeritus of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra;
principal conductor emeritus of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra; conductor laureate of the Royal Scottish Orchestra; and first principal guest conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. He last appeared with the New York Philharmonic in late November-December 2001, leading works by Weber, Brahms, and Taneyev.
Soprano Hillevi Martinpelto, a resident of Stockholm, concentrates most of her work this season in Sweden, where she sings regularly with the Royal Opera. Recent operatic engagements, at home and abroad, have included Elisabeth in Wagner's Tannhäuser; Desdemona in Verdi's Otello; La Contessa in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore; Alice Ford in Verdi's Falstaff; and the Marschallin in R. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in Stockholm. She also has sung Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin in Leipzig; Amelia in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in Gothenburg; Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly in Berlin; Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni in Dresden, Menorca, and Hong Kong; and Vitellia in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito at the Maggio Musicale in Florence and in Munich.
Ms. Martinpelto has given Lieder recitals and sung in concert performances of Lohengrin, Weber's Der Freischütz, La clemenza di Tito, and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Edinburgh Festival, as well as concert performances of La clemenza di Tito with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in London and New York. Her appearances with orchestra have included Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in Amsterdam; Mahler's Symphony No. 2 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Sir Simon Rattle's valedictory concerts as its music director; Mendelssohn's Elijah in Paris; Handel's Messiah in London at the BBC Proms; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin and at the Tanglewood Music Festival; Schumann's Paradise and the Peri in Torino; and Sibelius's Luonnatar with the Hallé Orchestra, Manchester.
Hillevi Martinpelto trained in Stockholm and made her debut at the Royal Opera as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. Her principal recordings are on the Deutsche Grammophon and EMI labels. These concerts represent her New York Philharmonic debut.
American baritone Thomas Hampson has performed in the world's preeminent concert halls and opera houses and with many of today's most renowned musicians and orchestras; he also maintains an active interest in teaching, music research, and technology. An important interpreter of German romantic song, he is known as a leading proponent of the study of American song through his Hampsong Foundation, which he founded in 2003 to promote intercultural dialogue and understanding. In the 2009-10 season Mr. Hampson becomes the first Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic as well as the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence. In these roles he will perform three programs with the Orchestra, appear on the Orchestra's European tour, give a recital in AlIce Tully Hall, and present three lectures entitled "Listening to Thought" as part of the Orchestra's Insights Series.
Much of Mr. Hampson's 2009-10 season is devoted to his "Song of America" project. In collaboration with the Library of Congress, Mr. Hampson is performing recitals and presenting master classes, educational activities, exhibitions, and broadcasts across the country and through a new interactive online resource, www.songofamerica.net; as part of the project, he has just released a new album, Wondrous Free - Song of America II, on his own label, Thomas Hampson Media. Other engagements include Mendelssohn's
Elijah, led by Kurt Masur in Leipzig; Verdi's Ernani and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin with Zurich Opera; Verdi's La traviata at The Metropolitan Opera; solo recitals throughout the United States and in many European capitals; and the galas of the Vienna Staatsoper and the new Winspear Opera House in Dallas.Raised in Spokane, Washington, Thomas Hampson has released more than 150 albums that have received many honors, including a Grammy Award, two Edison Prizes, and the Grand Prix du Disque. He has been named Kammersänger of the Vienna Staatsoper; Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France; and Special Advisor to the Study and Performance of Music in America by Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress. Other accolades include the Austrian Medal of Honor in Arts and Sciences (in 2004), and the Edison Life Achievement Award (2005). Mr. Hampson last appeared with the New York Philharmonic on September 20, 2001, in Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem, led by Kurt Masur in memory of 9/11.
Repertoire
Mozart's three-movement Symphony No. 38, Prague, while actually written in Vienna, was premiered in Prague in January 1787, only a month after its completion. Mozart had arrived in the Czech city less than one month after the first Prague performance of his latest opera, The Marriage of Figaro, and touched by the universal delight expressed by the people of Prague for Figaro, offered the city his newest symphony, which he conducted at its premiere. The New York Philharmonic first performed the appropriately nicknamed Prague Symphony in January 1866, led by Carl Bergmann, and most recently, while on tour in West Palm Beach, Florida, in February 2003, led by Lorin Maazel.
Alexander Zemlinsky was a friend to Schoenberg and Mahler, and his music, like much of theirs, is sensual and deeply expressive. The Lyric Symphony of 1922-23, his best known and most performed work, is akin to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde - a work in the form of an orchestral song cycle, but with the scope and weight of a symphony. Set to texts from the work of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, and sung by solo baritone and soprano in alternation, its seven connected movements explore an emotional journey of love, moving from yearning to attainment and then to a final parting. The work has been programmed by the Philharmonic only once before, in December 1979, with soprano Johanna Meier, baritone Dale Duesing, and James Levine conducting.
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