Alan Gilbert To Conduct Mahler's Dramatic, Autobiographical Symphony No. 6 9/30, 10/1

Music Director Alan Gilbert will lead the New York Philharmonic in Mahler's Symphony No. 6, launching a season-long focus that honors the 150th anniversary of the composer/conductor's birth and the 100th anniversary of his death and last season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Wednesday, September 29, 2010, at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, September 30, at 7:30 p.m., and Friday, October 1, at 8:00 p.m.

In the course of the season Mr. Gilbert will conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 5, and his Kindertotenlieder, featuring baritone Thomas Hampson. Sir Colin Davis will lead Des Knaben Wunderhorn with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and tenor Ian Bostridge; and Daniel Harding, in his Philharmonic debut, will conduct the Symphony No. 4. Archival exhibitions will also display scores and other memorabilia about Mahler's time with the Orchestra.

"There's something very special about the Sixth Symphony," says Mr. Gilbert. "It is a deeply despairing, pessimistic work; something about the ending is just utterly devastating. But the journey along the way covers the entire life experience. Some of the music in this symphony is the most ecstatic, unbelievably happy, beautiful music that Mahler ever wrote. It is really a picture of life in a very real sense."

"Gustav Mahler was a music director of this Orchestra and also one of the greatest composers of the 20th century," Mr. Gilbert continues. "We're playing quite a few of his works this season - and I think it's an appropriate way to honor this most important musician, not only for the New York Philharmonic, but for everybody who loves music.

Related Events
• 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. 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 or from iTunes.

• National Radio Broadcast
This concert will be broadcast the week of October 18, 2010,* on The New York Philharmonic This Week, a radio concert series syndicated nationally to more than 300 stations by the WFMT Radio Network. The 52-week series, hosted by actor Alec Baldwin, is generously underwritten by The Kaplen Foundation, the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Philharmonic's corporate partner, MetLife Foundation. The broadcast will be available on the Philharmonic's Website, nyphil.org. The program is broadcast locally in the New York metropolitan area on Classical 105.9 FM WQXR on Thursdays at 9:00 p.m.
*Check local listings for broadcast and program information.

• Archival Exhibit
Dimitri Mitropoulos: Conducting the Unfamiliar, 1940-1960. The Greek-born conductor (1896-1960), who served as the New York Philharmonic's Music Director at the height of his orchestral career, was a champion of the new and unusual, expanding the Orchestra's repertoire, commissioning new works, and promoting the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. The exhibition, marking the 50th anniversary of Mitropoulos's death, will focus on the music that he brought to the Philharmonic's audiences. Bruno Walter Gallery, Avery Fisher Hall, September 27-November 30,
2010. [Editors note: Mahler: His Last Months in New York will be mounted in the Bruno Walter Gallery from April 1 to May 30, 2011.]

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 New York Magazine called "a moment of metamorphosis and continuity." 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, and The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, held in 2010-11 by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter; an annual three-week festival; and CONTACT!, the New York Philharmonic's new-music series. In the 2010-11 season he will lead 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 Mr. Gilbert's inaugural season included major tours of Asia and Europe and an acclaimed staged presentation of Ligeti's opera, Le Grand Macabre.

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.