Alan Gilbert To Conduct CONTACT! Concerts 12/17-18

New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert will conduct the season's second program of CONTACT!, the Orchestra's new-music series, leading Philharmonic musicians in concerts on Friday, December 17, 2010, at 7:00 p.m. at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Saturday, December 18, 2010, at 8:00 p.m. at Symphony Space. The program will feature two World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commissions by James Matheson and Jay Alan Yim, and a U.S. Premiere by Julian Anderson. WNYC's John Schaefer, host of Soundcheck and New Sounds, will host the December 17 concert, and Alan Gilbert will host the December 18 concert; both will involve interviews with the composers. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, tickets to the concert will include admission to the museum on the day of performance.

Julian Anderson's music for the ballet, The Comedy of Change - a U.S. Premiere - is based on Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and "inspired by Darwin's observation of nature as a moving force." James Matheson's World Premiere True South unfolds, according to the composer, "as a very loosely structured set of variations." In neverthesamerivertwice - Jay Alan Yim's World Premiere - the piano and orchestra act "as 21st-century partners in a shared enterprise."

The concert will be presented on Q2, WQXR's online contemporary music stream, on Thursday, December 23, at 8:00 p.m., Saturday, December 25, at 8:00 p.m., and Tuesday, December 28, at 4:00 p.m. Listeners may access the stream at www.wqxr.org/q2; select the Q2 tab on the Player and click "Listen."

Related Event
• On the Music: The New York Philharmonic Podcast
Elliott Forrest, Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, producer, and weekend host on Classical 105.9 FM WQXR, is the producer of this podcast, which will cover the CONTACT! concerts in November and December. These award-winning previews of upcoming programs - through musical selections as well as interviews with guest artists, conductors, and Orchestra musicians - are available at nyphil.org/podcast and from iTunes.

Artist
Alan Gilbert became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in September 2009, the first native New Yorker to hold the post, ushering in what The New York Times called "an adventurous new era" at the Philharmonic. In his inaugural season he introduced a number of new initiatives: the positions of The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, held by Magnus Lindberg; The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, held in 2010-11 by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter; an annual three-week festival, which in 2010-11 is titled Hungarian Echoes, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen; and CONTACT!, the New York Philharmonic's new-music series. In the 2010-11 season Mr. Gilbert is leading the Orchestra on two tours of European music capitals; two performances at Carnegie Hall, including the venue's 120th Anniversary Concert; and a
staged presentation of Janá?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen. Highlights of his inaugural season included major tours of Asia and Europe and an acclaimed staged presentation of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre.

Mr. Gilbert is the first person to hold the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at The Juilliard School, and 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; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras; and the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich's Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. From 2003 to 2006 he served as 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.

Composers
Julian Anderson was born in London in 1967 and studied composition with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr, and Tristan Murail. His Diptych (1990) for orchestra won the 1992 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Young Composers and was subsequently nominated as the BBC entry in the 1996 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. The London Sinfonietta commissioned his Khorovod (1994) and Alhambra Fantasy (2000), both of which have been performed across Europe and the U.S. His other works include the orchestral BBC Proms commission The Stations of the Sun (1998), which has been performed by both the Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras, and the chamber work Poetry Nearing Silence (1997), commissioned by the Nash Ensemble. Mr. Anderson has been artistic director of the Philharmonia Orchestra's Music of Today since 2001, and was the Cleveland Orchestra's Daniel Lewis Young Composer Fellow (2005-07), from which emerged Fantasias - also performed in London by the National Youth Orchestra under Semyon Bychkov at the 2010 BBC Proms; and he became the London Philharmonic Orchestra's composer-in-residence in September 2010. He is currently writing an opera for English National Opera. There are two award-winning CDs on the market on the Ondine and NMC labels.

About Comedy of Change
Julian Anderson's music for the ballet The Comedy of Change is receiving its U.S. Premiere in these CONTACT! concerts. Based on Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the work was premiered in September 2009, a joint commission from Rambert Dance and the Asko Ensemble. The composer told The Financial Times that the piece "is inspired by Darwin's observation of nature as a moving force, ambivalent and fluctuating - a concept well-suited to music and dance." Describing himself as an armchair ornithologist, Mr. Anderson says he became fascinated by Darwin's observation of how birds indulge in ornate creations that do not always reflect the purpose for which they were intended. The idea of evolution, he said, "pushed me toward gradual change [as a determining factor in the music]. I started with one chord - a sonority that, when you hear it, will be three-dimensional. I worked a lot on it, to get a depth of sound. There are very low notes on bass clarinet and harp, and very high string harmonics, the combination of which leads to a strange sort of resonance." The Times of London noted: "Julian Anderson's wondrous new score glistens with elliptical rhythms and scatters sounds like stars in the night sky."
James Matheson's music has been performed by the Seattle and Albany Symphony Orchestras, American Composers Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and other ensembles. Among his best known works are Songs of Desire, Love and Loss, which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall; The Anatomy of Melancholy; Colonnade; and River, River, River, which critical reviews characterize as "beautiful," lustrous," and "amiable and often sumptuous." Mr. Matheson, who was born in 1970 in Des Moines, Iowa, holds degrees from Cornell University (D.M.A. 2001, M.F.A. 1997), where he studied composition with Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra, and at Swarthmore College (B.A. 1992), where he majored in music and philosophy, studying composition with Gerald Levinson. In September 2009 he became the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Composer Fellowship Program. He has been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to write a work for the 2011-12 season.

About True South

"I like inverting things - turning them upside down, or inside out - and having another look. While working on True South I became fascinated with the notion of taking traditional harmonic materials and stacking them, toying with them, wringing them out as a way of creating fresh ways of hearing them. The piece unfolds as a (very) loosely structured set of variations, in which the basic ideas are continuously transformed in surprising and asymmetrical ways, flowing through shimmering brightness and darkness, sparseness and great density, energetic motion and stillness. An underlying lyricism grounds the work, giving it - I hope - emotional weight and human resonance."
- James Matheson

Jay Alan Yim (b. 1958) is associate professor of composition at Northwestern University. His works have been commissioned and performed by numerous institutions and ensembles, including the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Korean Broadcast Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, London Sinfonietta, New Music Consort, Arditti Quartet, Nieuw Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble SurPlus, International Contemporary Ensemble, and dal niente. Mr. Yim is the recipient of a Kennedy Center/Friedheim award, three BMI and two ASCAP awards, Tanglewood and Aspen fellowships, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and three Illinois Arts Council fellowships. He was composer/fellow at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 1996, and is the co-founder of the "localStyle" digital media collaborative, with museum installations in the U.S. and Europe.

About neverthesamerivertwice
"In this work the piano and orchestra are cast as 21st-century partners in a shared enterprise, instead of dramatically opposed adversaries. I've approached the piano as a strictly monodic (rather than contrapuntal or chordal) instrument. This tactic puts the piano on a more equal footing with the linearity of other orchestral instruments, and evokes correspondences with the tradition of toccatas and the continuo in Baroque concerti.

Structurally, the keyboard has a vertebral role: it functions as the backbone of the work. It's the source of all of the orchestral figuration, the pivotal character in the ensemble; from beginning to end, there is only one bar where the piano is unaccompanied.

The title refers to Heraclitus's well-known aphorism about the paradoxical impossibility of stepping into the same river twice. Early on, I had an image of a pianistic river flowing through varied orchestral terrain. My work isn't a depiction of any single water course, but more of a hydrogeological archetype traced in reverse, from braided delta through forest and canyon to glacial source."