Mr. Gilbert is conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of Hamburg's NDR Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted other leading orchestras in the U.S. and abroad, including the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphony orchestras; the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras; and the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich's Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. In 2003 he was named the first music director of the Santa Fe Opera.
Alan Gilbert studied at Harvard University, The Curtis Institute of Music, and The Juilliard School. From 1995 to 1997 he was the assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. In November 2008 he made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting John Adams's Doctor Atomic. His recordings have received a 2008 Grammy Award nomination and top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone magazine. On May 15, 2010, Mr. Gilbert received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Curtis Institute of Music.
Repertoire
Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 at one point carried the subtitle "Tragic," a word that aptly suits the work's overriding sense of doom. Although it was composed in a relatively happy time in Mahler's life, in 1903-04, this dark, ominous score nonetheless later came to have autobiographical symbolism for him as it foreshadowed the personal tragedies he would experience soon after he completed the work: the death of his firstborn daughter, his forced resignation from the helm of the Vienna Opera, and the confirmation of his own deteriorating health. His widow, Alma, commented that she believed no other work had been so directly personal to her husband. Mahler set the symphony in the key of A minor, and its distinctly bleak outlook is perhaps most evident in the repeated "rhythm of catastrophe" representing Fate's approach. The finale of the symphony describes a hero felled by three blows from Fate - the last of which, according to the composer's
instructions, must sound "like the stroke of an axe." Mahler conducted the world premiere of the Symphony No. 6 in 1906, but revised the work several times, re-ordering movements and refining the orchestration. The New York Philharmonic gave the work's U.S. premiere in December 1947 under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos, and performed it most recently in June 2005, led by Lorin Maazel.
