Final Installment of Mid-Winter Russian Masters Features Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich

Guest conductor Larry Rachleff and guest pianist Kirill Gerstein join the Columbus Symphony for the final concerts in their Mid-Winter Russian Masters Festival. The program will include Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 ("The Year 1905"). WOSU's Christopher Purdy will hold a free, pre-concert lecture about the program for ticket holders at 7pm each night on the fourth floor of the Ohio Theatre's Galbreath Pavilion.

The Columbus Symphony performs the final program of the Mid-Winter Russian Masters Festival at the Ohio Theatre (39 E. State St.) on Friday, February 4, and Saturday, February 5, at 8pm daily. Tickets are $20.50-$66.50 for adults and $11.50-$34.50 for children, and can be purchased at the Ohio Theatre Ticket Office (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (614) 228-8600 or (800) 745-3000. The Ohio Theatre Ticket Office will also be open two hours prior to each performance. Students between the ages of 13-19 may purchase $5 High Five tickets while available. The 2010-11 Classical Series is made possible through the generous support of series sponsor Battelle.

About guest conductor Larry Rachleff
Now celebrating his 13th season as Music Director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, Rachleff also serves as Director of Orchestras and holds the Walter Kris Hubert chair at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music in Houston. During his career, he has also been Music Director of the San Antonio Symphony. A former faculty member of Oberlin Conservatory, where he was Music Director of Orchestras and Conductor of the Contemporary Ensemble, he also served as conductor of the Opera Theatre at the University of Southern California. Rachleff has conducted and presented master classes all over the world, including the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, the Zurich Hochschule, the Sydney and Queensland, Australia conservatories, the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, and Royal Northern College in the UK. He has also served as principal conducting teacher for the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Conductors' Guild, and the International Workshop for Conductors in the Czech Republic.

About guest pianist Kirill Gerstein
Russian pianist Kirill Gerstein has quickly proven to be one of today's most intriguing young musicians. His masterful technique, musical curiosity, and probing interpretations have led to explorations of classical music and jazz, advanced degrees by the age of 20, a professorship in piano by the age of 27, and a full performance schedule at the world's major music centers and festivals. Gerstein was awarded the 2010 Gilmore Artist Award, only the sixth pianist to have been so honored. He was also awarded a 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant. His first recording for Myrios Classics of recital works by Schumann, Liszt, and Oliver Knussen was released in October 2010. As a child, Gerstein attended one of the country's special music schools for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents' extensive record collection. At age 14, he came to the US to continue his studies in jazz piano as the youngest student ever to attend Boston's Berklee College of Music.

About Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, perhaps the last great representative of Romanticism in classical music. Rachmaninoff made a point of using his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a natural grasp of writing for piano and a striking gift for melody. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is a concertante work (a concerto in that one or more soloists are on prominent display, and a symphony in that the soloists are discernibly a part of the total ensemble and not preeminent) written for solo piano and symphony orchestra and closely resembles a piano concerto. According to the score, the work was written at Villa Senar from July 3 to August 18, 1934. Rachmaninoff himself, a noted interpreter of his own works, played the solo piano part at the piece's premiere at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 7, 1934, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

About Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Dmitri Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. He achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Leon Trotsky's chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the Stalinist bureaucracy. His music was officially denounced twice, in 1936 and 1948, and was periodically banned. Despite this, his works were popular and well received, earning accolades and state awards. The Symphony No. 11 in G minor (subtitled The Year 1905 in reference to events of the Russian Revolution of 1905) was written in 1957, and premiered by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Natan Rakhlin on October 30, 1957. The symphony proved an instant success in Russia-his largest, in fact, since the Leningrad Symphony just over a decade earlier-and earned him a 1958 Lenin Prize.

www.columbussymphony.com

The Columbus Symphony performs Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich in the final installment of the MID-WINTER RUSSIAN MASTERS FESTIVAL
Friday & Saturday, February 4 & 5, 8 pm daily
Ohio Theatre (39 E. State St.)
Guest conductor Larry Rachleff and guest pianist Kirill Gerstein join the Columbus Symphony for the final concerts in their Mid-Winter Russian Masters Festival. The program will include Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 ("The Year 1905"). WOSU's Christopher Purdy will hold a free, pre-concert lecture about the program for ticket holders at 7pm each night on the fourth floor of the Ohio Theatre's Galbreath Pavilion. Tickets are $20.50-$66.50 for adults and $11.50-$34.50 for children and can be purchased at the Ohio Theatre Ticket Office (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (614) 228-8600 or (800) 745-3000. www.columbussymphony.com