Yale School of Music Announces 2014-15 Season of YALE IN NEW YORK

Yale School of Music announces the 2014-15 season of YALE IN NEW YORK. The series returns to Carnegie Hall for its eighth year, while expanding to include a special season opener at Avery Fisher Hall that features John Adams conducting the Yale Philharmonia and Brentano Quartet in a performance of Adams' Beethoven-inspired Absolute Jest and Beethoven's Symphony No. 4.

Two concerts at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall feature Yale Opera performing music from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and the Yale Percussion Group, performing music collected on their recent trip to Ghana as well asMauricio Kagel's instrumental-theatrical work Dressur.

Yale in New York has garnered a reputation for its creative and diverse offerings, with frequent collaborations between Yale's distinguished faculty and its exceptional network of current students and alumni.

JOHN ADAMS
BRENTANO QUARTET
YALE PHILHARMONIA
Sunday, October 19, 2014 at 5:00pm

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center
Tickets: $15-$40, $10 off for students
Available at Avery Fisher box office (212) 721-6500
or online at lincolncenter.org

Friday, October 17, 2014 at 7:30pm

Woolsey Hall, New Haven, CT
Tickets: $10-$15, $5 Students

The Brentano Quartet, in its debut year as Quartet-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music (succeeding the Tokyo String Quartet which retired after 37 years), joins the Yale Philharmonia and composer/conductor John Adams for a special performance at Avery Fisher Hall to open the 2014-15 season. The program pairs Adams' Absolute Jest (2012), an "audacious and affectionate riff on Beethoven's scherzos...dense, roiling and furiously inventive as a gripping 25-minute sonic joy ride" (Musical America) with Beethoven's Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major. This marks the 2nd New York performance ofAbsolute Jest; the San Francisco Symphony presented its world and New York premieres under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas in March 2012.

Beethoven's music is intricately woven into Absolute Jest, "a provocative...Adams-ized mélange of late Beethoven" (Los Angeles Times). Hence Adams' choice to pair his own work with a Beethoven symphony. The Fourth Symphony is sometimes overshadowed by the composer's third and fifth symphonies; Robert Schumann called it "a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants."

Adams notes: "There is nothing particularly new about one composer internalizing the music of another and 'making it his own.' Composers are drawn to another's music to the point where they want to live in it, and that can happen in a variety of fashions." This concert pairs his interpretation of a Beethoven symphony with a work whose creation he has called "the most extended experience in pure 'invention' that I've ever undertaken...a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design."

The Yale Philharmonia

The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale is one of America's foremost music school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire. Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall, as well as Yale Opera productions in the Shubert Theater.

The Yale Philharmonia has performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In 2008, the orchestra undertook its first tour of Asia, with acclaimed performances in the Seoul Arts Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall and National Center for the Performing Arts (Beijing), and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

Each year, the Philharmonia's concert series in historic Woolsey Hall offers a broad range of repertoire under resident conductor Shinik Hahm, principal guest conductor Peter Oundjian, and distinguished guest conductors. Recent seasons have featured guest conductors including Krzysztof Penderecki, William Christie, and James Conlon. The orchestra plays not only the symphonic repertoire but concertos, new music, and choral works.

Past Performances by Yale Philharmonia with Yale in New York

"... a fleet, immaculate and vivid rendition of the overture. The violins played with
virtuosic flair... The orchestra also played beautifully in a buoyant rendition of
Handel's six-movement Concerto Grosso in G minor."
- The New York Times, 2/28/2012

"The performance was sensational: well prepared, solidly and precisely executed,
and rippling with high-energy percussion and brass playing and a fluid
interplay of polished strings as well as winds."
- The New York Times, 12/16/2008

TREASURES FROM THE
KOCH COLLECTION
Sunday, December 7, 2014 at 7:30pm

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
Tickets: $30, Students $15
Available two months before the concert at the Carnegie Hall box office
(57th Street and 7th Ave.), by calling CarnegieCharge at 212/247-7800, or atwww.carnegiehall.org

Singers of Yale Opera perform treasures from the Frederick R. Koch Collectionalongside music composed by Yale alumni. The Koch Collection is housed at Yale'sBeinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which is co-presenting the event. Doris Yarick Cross is the artistic director of Yale Opera.

Frederick R. Koch - dubbed the "other" Koch brother by Vanity Fair - is a lifelong supporter of the arts and a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. The Koch Collection at the Beinecke is one of the richest collections of 19th- and 20th-century musical and literary manuscripts. The collection, assembled primarily during the 1980s, contains much material relating to opera and other collaborations between authors and composers, including Georges Bizet, Johannes Brahms, Jules Massenet, Giacomo Puccini, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Giuseppi Verdi and Richard Wagner, among many others.

About Yale Opera

The Yale Opera program at the Yale School of Music, led by artistic director Doris Yarick Cross, has been extraordinarily successful in preparing singers for active professional careers. Graduates of the program appear on the rosters of all of the world's major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, and the Vienna Staatsoper, among many others. This success is a result of the extraordinary depth and breadth of the Yale Opera program. Yale Opera not only features a fine studio voice faculty, but provides expert instruction in diction, languages, style, acting, and body movement. All students have the opportunity to perform major roles in productions ranging from opera excerpts with piano to full productions of major works in New Haven's historic Shubert Theater. Yale Opera singers have worked with such distinguished artists as stage directors Colin Graham, Marc Verzatt, Francesca Zambello, Christopher Alden, Sam Helfrich, Thor Steingraber, and Vera Calabria; and conductors Giuseppe Grazioli, Federico Cortese, Dominique Trottein, and Jeremy Silver. Guest master class clinicians have included Alan Held, Ann Murray, Renata Scotto, Elly Ameling, Regine Crespin, Sherrill Milnes, and Marilyn Horne

"The cast not only engaged the ensemble singing with astonishing professionalism
and charisma - they sang like friends ... If you ever felt the need to argue with your friends about why opera is relevant to the 21st century, take your friends to hear Yale Opera."
- Hartford Courant
"Yale Opera's students come into the program knowing that their nascent careers are going to be fully nurtured for success on international stages."
- New Haven Register

YALE PERCUSSION GROUP
Sunday, January 25, 2015 at 2:00pm

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
Tickets: $30, Students $15
Available two months before the concert at the Carnegie Hall box office
(57th Street and 7th Ave.), by calling CarnegieCharge at 212/247-7800, or at www.carnegiehall.org

Saturday, January 24, 2015 at 7:30pm

Morse Recital Hall, Sprague Hall, New Haven, CT
Tickets: $10-$15, $5 Students

The Yale Percussion Group presents music from across the globe, including Mauricio Kagel's masterful Dressur and music collected during Yale's recent two-week musical trip to Ghana. In May 2014, the six graduate students of the percussion group spent time in Accra, Cape Coast, and the village of Yamoransa, conducting research and meeting with Ghanaian drum masters, sought out by scholars and musicians worldwide. The students recorded Ghanaian musical practices and African drumming rhythms for future transcription. Along with the Yale Concert Band, the students also performed with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ghana, participated in joint concerts at two universities, and took part in classes and philanthropic work.

The YPG will also play Mauricio Kagel's virtuoso and highly choreographed percussion trio Dressur (1977). The ensemble earned raves for its performance of this same work at Carnegie Hall in 2010.
Video of Yale Percussion Group performing Dressur:
www.vicfirth.com/exchange/2010/12/01/kagels-dressur-the-instrumental-theater-idiom

Capital New York interview with members of YPG:
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/12/928988/yale-percussion-group-picks-most-important-sounds-old-and-new

About the Yale Percussion Group

Founded in 1997 by Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group has been called "something truly extraordinary" by composer Steve Reich. It is composed of talented and dedicated young artists who have come from around the world for graduate study at the Yale School of Music. Members of the YPG have gone on to form the acclaimed percussion quartet S?, and to perform with the Oslo Philharmonic and Auckland Philharmonic, and are percussionists in America's great chamber music ensembles including Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Currently, alumni of YPG teach at the University of Miami, Michigan State University, Baylor University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Cornell, University of Alabama, Notre Dame, and Dartmouth University, and the University of Kansas.

YALE IN NEW YORK

Launched in 2007, Yale in New York is the acclaimed series in which distinguished faculty members-many of them famous soloists-share the limelight with exceptional alumni and students on Carnegie Hall's stages, capturing the intense collaboration found on every level at the Yale School of Music. Highlights of past seasons include: the classical legacy of Benny Goodman; undiscovered Prokofiev works; the Oral History of American Music project; Penderecki conducting Penderecki; Sleeping Giant; Robert Mealy's Yale Baroque Ensemble playing experimental 17th century music; a Prokofiev piano mini-marathon with Boris Berman; music for low instruments; Tokyo String Quartet; Hindemith the Master and Prankster; and a celebrated new production of A Soldier's Tale with Yale School of Drama. The series is curated by David Shifrin.