CSO To Perform Mozart's REQUIEM

CSO Music Director Rossen Milanov leads the Columbus Symphony, Columbus Symphony Chorus, and four brilliant guest vocalists in a haunting and enigmatic performance of Mozart's last and unfinished masterpiece. This emotional journey is preceded by a clever piece by composer Mason Bates that combines technology and live sound to depict an orchestra of historic instruments.

The Columbus Symphony presents the Mozart: Requiem at the Ohio Theatre (39 E. State St.) on Friday and Saturday, March 29 and 30, at 8pm. Tickets start at $10 and can be purchased in-person at the CAPA Ticket Center (39 E. State St.), online at www.columbussymphony.com, or by phone at (614) 469-0939 or (800) 745-3000. The CAPA Ticket Center will also be open two hours prior to each performance.

Prelude - Patrons are invited to attend a 30-minute, pre-concert Subject Matter lecture titled "Summoning Spirits: A Musical Séance: by Ohio Dominican English Professor Jeremy Glazier.

Postlude - (Friday only) Directly following the concert, patrons are invited to meet and mingle with the Columbus Symphony string players at the Sheraton Bar.

Respected and admired by audiences and musicians alike, Rossen Milanov is currently the music director of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra (CSO), Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, Princeton Symphony Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias (OSPA) in Spain.

In 2017, Milanov received an Arts Prize from The Columbus Foundation for presenting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as part of CSO's 2017 Picnic with the Pops summer series. Under his leadership, the organization has expanded its reach by connecting original programming with community-wide initiatives, such as focusing on women composers and nature conservancy, presenting original festivals, and supporting and commissioning new music.

Milanov has collaborated with some of the world's preeminent artists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Midori, Christian Tetzlaff, and André Watts. During his 11-year tenure with The Philadelphia Orchestra, he conducted more than 200 performances. In 2015, he completed a 15-year tenure as music director of nationally recognized training orchestra Symphony in C in New Jersey. In 2013, he wrapped up a 17-year tenure with the New Symphony Orchestra in his native city of Sofia, Bulgaria. His passion for new music has resulted in numerous world premieres of works by composers such as Derek Bermel, Mason Bates, Caroline Shaw, Phillip Glass, Richard Danielpour, Nicolas Maw, and Gabriel Prokofiev, among others.

Noted for his versatility, Milanov is also a welcomed presence in the worlds of opera and ballet. He has collaborated with Komische Oper Berlin for Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk), Opera Oviedo for the Spanish premiere of Tchaikovsky's Mazzepa and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (awarded best Spanish production for 2015), and Opera Columbus for Verdi's La Traviata.

An experienced ballet conductor, he has been seen at New York City Ballet and collaborated with some of the best-known choreographers of our time, such Mats Ek, Benjamin Millepied, and most recently, Alexei Ratmansky in the critically acclaimed revival of Swan Lake in Zurich with the Zurich Ballet, and in Paris with La Scala Ballet.

Praised for her "crystalline tone," Polish-American soprano Alexandra Nowakowski is a graduate of the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. In the 2017/18 AVA season, she debuted Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos) and Freia (Das Rheingold). Other roles at AVA include Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Sophie (Werther), Zerlina (Don Giovanni), and Musetta (La bohème). She was the Soprano I soloist in the Bach B Minor Mass with the Bach Society Houston, and the soprano soloist in Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra. Alexandra is the second prize winner of the Gerda Lissner Lieder/Song Competition, first prize winner of the Gerda Lissner Foundation Competition, first prize winner of the Violetta DuPont Competition, and fourth prize winner in the Giulio Gari Foundation Competition.

Mezzo-soprano Hannah Ludwig is currently in her fourth year at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, where she recently performed the role of Charlotte in Werther, Isabella in L'italiana in Algieri, Frugola in Il Tabarro, and Siebel in Faust. In 2016, she received encouragement awards from the Gulf coast Regional of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Licia Albanese-Puccini International Vocal Competition. She is also a grant winner of the Giulio Gari Vocal Competition. Ludwig was a two-year finalist in the Tier II category of the Inaugural James Toland Vocal Competition in Oakland.

Lebanese-American tenor Roy Hage is a two-time Grammy-nominated artist who has performed more than 40 roles and with orchestras including the Philadelphia, Santa Fe, and Cleveland Orchestras, the St. Louis and New Jersey Symphonies, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Symphony in C, and CityMusic Cleveland among others. His two Grammy nominations were for his appearance as a solo artist in the Pentatone Recording of the Santa Fe World Premiere of "Cold Mountain." Hage is currently a third-year resident artist at the Academy of Vocal Arts.

Bass-baritone Adam Cioffari recently sang the role of Papageno in Die Zauberflöte in a return to the Teatro Municipal de Santiago as well as the role of Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro with Opera Columbus, Colline in La Boheme with Knoxville Opera, and Masetto in Don Giovanni with Austin Opera and Salt Marsh Opera. He also sang the Commentator in the world premiere of Wang's Scalia/Ginsburg at the Castleton Festival. He has recently performed with the Utah Symphony and Tucson Symphony, Pensacola Opera, Florentine Opera, and the Musiklehrer in Ariadne auf Naxos at The Glimmerglass Festival. Recent debuts include the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Theatre Capitole de Toulouse.

A Grammy-nominated American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music, Bates is distinguished by his innovations in orchestration and large-scale form. Best known for his expansion of the orchestra to include electronics, he is the second-most performed living composer in the US and works closely with the San Francisco Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where he worked as composer-in-residence. In 2015, he was named composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (their first ever composer-in-residence appointment), and recently had his contract renewed for another two years though 2019-20. His 2016 composition, Auditorium, is a work for electronica and orchestra commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony. The piece is scored for a small orchestra accompanied by a processed pre-recording of a smaller ensemble performing an original neo-Baroque composition by Bates.

A prolific and influential composer of the classical era, Mozart composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence is profound on subsequent Western art music. Mozart composed part of the Requiem in Vienna in late 1791, but it was unfinished at his death on December 5 of the same year. A completed version dated 1792 by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg, who commissioned the piece for a requiem service to commemorate the anniversary of his wife's death on February 14. Walsegg probably intended to pass the Requiem off as his own composition, as he is known to have done with other works. This plan was frustrated by a public benefit performance for Mozart's widow Constanze. She was responsible for several stories surrounding the composition of the work, including the claims that Mozart received the commission from a mysterious messenger who did not reveal the commissioner's identity, and that Mozart came to believe that he was writing the requiem for his own funeral.