December 13, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Portland, Ore. … Old and new share the spotlight as Music Director James DePreist conducts the Oregon Symphony in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” in a concert that also features pianist Garrick Ohlsson performing a newly-commissioned piano concerto by American composer Michael Hersch on Jan. 4 and 5 at 7:30 p.m. and Jan. 6 at 8 p.m. at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Media support is provided by The Oregonian.
In an unusual collaborative effort, Ohlsson, the Oregon Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra came together to commission a piano concerto from Hersch, who, at the age of 31, has already amassed an impressive list of compositions, awards and accomplishments. He was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome in 2000 and the Berlin Prize in 2001, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997. His music, which has been performed both in the United States and abroad, has “inspired remarkable and sometimes ecstatic excitement in the world of classical music,” according to Tim Page of the Washington Post. The Piano Concerto received its world premiere last month in St. Louis, with Ohlsson performing under the leadership of conductor Marin Alsop.
Best known as an incomparable interpreter of Chopin, Ohlsson’s repertoire encompasses virtually the entire canon of piano literature, and has garnered him acclaim around the world. This season his many American engagements include performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Houston Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In Europe he will perform with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Sinfonica de Asturias in Spain, and the Orchestra National de Lyon in France. In addition to his orchestral appearances, Ohlsson will also be featured in a number of recitals during the 2002-2003 season, including Lincoln Center’s Great Performers in “Busoni at the Keyboard,” a three-recital series at Alice Tully Hall, which presents the piano music of Busoni in the company of works by Bach and Liszt. Ohlsson last appeared with the Symphony in 1999, when he performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.
DePreist opens the concert with Barber’s moving and somber “Adagio for Strings,” a well-known work performed by the Symphony last year in a special free memorial concert to honor the victims of September 11th. The power and strength of this music have made it an effective soundtrack for several films, including Oliver Stone’s 1986 Viet Nam epic, “Platoon.” Ohlsson follows with the Hersch concerto, described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as “frequently elegiac and lyrical.” Radio reviewer Chuck Lavazzi characterized the work as “both modern and ancient at the same time…a somber and introspective piece in which tone clusters and virtuoso piano flourishes are set against an open, chant-like theme...[which] lends an ineffable, mysterious quality to the music that reminded me of the mysticism of Hildegard von Bingen.”
The second half of the concert is devoted to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, a perennial audience favorite, which represents the composer’s ultimate mastery of the symphonic form, and was given its first performance only days before his untimely death from cholera.
Oregon Symphony Classical concerts regularly include additional opportunities for listeners to learn more about the music and the orchestra. These activities include:
Principal Cellist Nancy Ives will lead a discussion one hour before the concert of the works to be performed. Media support for “Pre-Concert Talks” is provided by Classical Millennium.
Conductor James DePreist will speak briefly from the podium in “Saturday Interactive.” Media support for “Saturday Interactive” is provided by KINKfm102.
Audience members are invited to stay for a 15-20 minute panel discussion with Symphony staff and guest artists. Media support for “Sunday Post-Concert Discussion” is provided by KBPS Classical 89.9 FM.
Performances are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 4 and 5 at 7:30 p.m. and Monday, Jan. 6 at 8 p.m. at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets range in price from $16 to $72 and may be purchased at the Oregon Symphony Ticket Office (923 S.W. Washington), Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or charged by phone at 503-228-1353 or (800) 228-7343. Tickets also may be purchased at all Ticketmaster outlets (503-790-ARTS) or through Ticketmaster Online, via the Symphony’s Web site at www.orsymphony.org. Service fees may apply.
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, American pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of extraordinary interpretive power and prodigious technical facility. Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire that encompasses virtually the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. Mr. Ohlsson’s concerto repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic—ranging from Haydn and Mozart to 20th century masters—and to date he has at his command some 80 works for piano and orchestra.
During 2002-03 Mr. Ohlsson is featured by Lincoln Center’s Great Performers in “Busoni at the Keyboard,” a three-recital series at Alice Tully Hall, which presents the piano music of Busoni, in the company of works by Bach, and Liszt. The series will highlight the influence of Bach and Liszt in shaping Busoni’s highly original synthesis of the classic, the Romantic, and the avant-garde.
In North America Mr. Ohlsson will be guest soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Ravinia), Fort Worth Symphony, Utah Symphony, National Symphony (DC), New Mexico Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Houston Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Nashville Symphony. In Europe he is heard with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Sinfonica de Asturias in Spain, and the Orchestra National de Lyon in France.
In addition to his three Busoni Festival recitals at Alice Tully Hall in New York, Mr. Ohlsson also gives recitals in Portland (OR), Modesto (CA), San Francisco, St. Paul (MN), Madrid and San Sebastian, Spain, London (Wigmore Hall), Milan, Warsaw and Duisburg (Germany), Purchase (NY), and Washington, D.C. (National Gallery). He is also heard in a three-concert mini-tour of the Midwest with the Takács Quartet (Kansas City, Cedar Falls, Ann Arbor).
Mr. Ohlsson’s 2001-02 season was marked by a return to Carnegie Hall in an imaginative recital that juxtaposed the music of Rachmaninoff and Mendelssohn with two works by John Adams, including the world premiere of “ American Berserk,” written especially for Mr. Ohlsson. 02)
2001-2002 was an exceptionally exciting season for Mr. Ohlsson. He was presented in recital by Carnegie Hall on its Keyboard Virtuoso series and was heard with the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony, London Symphony (at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall), Detroit Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Oregon Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, New Orleans Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Richmond Symphony, New World Symphony, Madison Symphony, Spokane Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, Florida West Coast Symphony, Edmonton Symphony, National Arts Center Orchestra (Ottawa), and Peoples’ Symphony. His recital engagements, in addition to Carnegie/New York, included San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, Fresno, Calgary, Baltimore and Kalamazoo (Gilmore Festival). Abroad, Mr. Ohlsson was soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony, Taiwan National Orchestra, and gave recitals in Tokyo as well as at Royal Festival Hall and at the Klavierfestival Ruhr.
Mr. Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician and has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács, and Tokyo String Quartets, among other ensembles. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio.
A prolific recording artist, Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, Bridge, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, and Virgin Classics labels. Mr. Ohlsson is currently embarked on a complete edition of the Beethoven sonatas, of which a number of installments are available.
Mr. Ohlsson has also recorded the Copland Piano Concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for the RCA Victor Red Seal label, which was hailed by the San Francisco Examiner as “terrific” and “vibrant.” Other releases include Mr. Ohlsson’s recordings of Beethoven sonatas, Haydn’s three “London” sonatas, and the Debussy etudes, all for Arabesque; and Grieg’s Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, and the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Sir Neville Marriner, for the Hänssler label.
A native of White Plains, New York, Mr. Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at 13 he entered The Juilliard School in New York City. In high school Mr. Ohlsson demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and languages, but the concert stage remained his true career objective. Mr. Ohlsson’s musical development has been influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne, and Irma Wolpe. Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal, which brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since that time, he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland where to this day he retains immense personal popularity. Mr. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He makes his home in San Francisco.
“Garrick Ohlsson: a genuine giant of the keyboard . . . utter technical assurance, keen musical intelligence.”
Michael Hersch (b. 1971) “has inspired remarkable—and sometimes ecstatic—excitement in the world of classical music,” wrote Tim Page in the Washington Post. Before the age of 30, Hersch was awarded the Prix de Rome (2000) and the Berlin Prize (2001), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), and he has had his music performed around the world. In December 1996, Hersch was a graduate student at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, contemplating what life as a composer would be like after graduation, when conductor Marin Alsop picked his score as the winner of the American Composers Prize and gave the work, “Elegy” for strings, a performance at Lincoln Center in February 1997.
Since that time, Hersch has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the 92nd Street Y, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and many other organizations. His music has been performed in Europe, Russia, the Far East and the US.
In the fall of 2001, while in Berlin, Hersch completed the score of his Symphony No. 2, which was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony and Mariss Jansons. It received its world premiere in Pittsburgh on April 26, 2002 followed by the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 30, 2002. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the Symphony No. 2, “it calls into being a world resonant with profound, sometimes rhapsodic, sometimes crushing emotion.” A new work for clarinet and cello was performed at the Pantheon in Rome in 2001 at the RomaEuropa Festival. Also this season, Hersch’s recent orchestral work, “Ashes of Memory,” was performed by orchestras around the US and in Europe.
For the 2002/03 season Michael Hersch has been selected as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s “Composer of the Year.” The orchestra will perform three of Hersch’s orchestral works during the season, including the PSO premiere of his Symphony No. 1 on their opening night gala. In addition to the performances in Pittsburgh, Hersch has composed a piano concerto for pianist Garrick Ohlsson for a consortium of orchestras led by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Oregon Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony. The world premiere will take place in St. Louis in November 2002, followed by the West Coast premiere in Oregon in January 2003 and a performance in Pittsburgh in March 2003. Also in January 2003, members of the Berlin Philharmonic will play Hersch’s newly revised “Octet for Strings” at the Philharmonie in Berlin. In addition to the piano concerto performances, Hersch’s “Ashes of Memory” will receive four performances by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in March.
Highlights from last season included the New York premiere of “Ashes of Memory” in March 2001, performed by Mariss Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and the world premiere of a commissioned work, “Umbra,” for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Robert Spano in April 2001. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented two new works last season: the New York premiere of his Solo Sonata for Violin, and a piano piece, “Mistral,” which Mr. Hersch performed at Merkin Concert Hall. His music was also featured in a program hosted by Ned Rorem at the 92nd Street Y. Hersch’s alma mater, Peabody Conservatory, also performed “Ashes of Memory” at Lincoln Center in April 2001, and in May 2001, Merkin Concert Hall presented a chamber concert featuring his music. While in Rome during the summer of 2001, Hersch wrote a work for the composer Hans Werner Henze, “Reflections on a Work of Henze,” which Hersch performed for Mr. Henze on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
Other past performance highlights include the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s commission and performance of Hersch’s Symphony No. 1 with Alan Gilbert conducting in November 1999, and a repeat of the work at the Cabrillo Festival with conductor Marin Alsop in 2000. In October 1998 the New York Chamber Symphony performed the world premiere of “Recollections of Fear, Hope and Discontent” and the CBC Vancouver Symphony performed the premiere of “On Sorrow, Anger and Reflection.” In April 1999 Hersch’s Piano Quartet received its premiere at Weill Recital Hall, commissioned by the Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Young Composers Workshop at Carnegie Hall.
Michael Hersch’s chamber music has been performed at the Pantheon in Rome, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Tanglewood Music Festival, the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, the American Music Festival in Washington DC, Merkin Concert Hall in New York, and elsewhere around the world.
One of the youngest composers ever to win the Guggenheim Fellowship in Music (1997), Mr. Hersch has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the American Composers Award, the New York Youth Symphony’s “First Music” prize, two “Meet the Composer” grants, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards and five ASCAP Foundation grants. He was also the youngest composer included in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s “Great Day in New York”, photograph and series of programs in January 2000. In 1997 he was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. In June 1998, he attended the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut and the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.
Mr. Hersch was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Reston, Virginia. He studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory in Russia and received a Certificate in Composition in 1995. In 1997 he completed his Masters Degree in Composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Mr. Hersch’s music is published by 21C Music Publishing, Inc.