Courtney Lewis To Make Debut With Jonathan Biss As Soloist, 4/20-25

Courtney Lewis, former Assistant Conductor, will make his New York Philharmonic subscription debut leading Jonathan Biss as soloist in Timo Andres's Piano Concerto No. 3, The Blind Banister, and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2; the program also includes selections from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet and Elgar's In the South (Alassio). The performances will take place Thursday, April 20, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, April 21 at 11:00 a.m.; Saturday, April 22 at 8:00 p.m.; and Tuesday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m.

Timo Andres's Piano Concerto No. 3, The Blind Banister - a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music - was written for Jonathan Biss's Beethoven/5 project, in which the pianist invited five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven's five piano concertos. Mr. Andres said: "Beethoven gave his early second piano concerto ('not one of my best,' in his own estimation) a kind of renovation in the form of a new cadenza, 20 years down the line.... My third piano concerto, The Blind Banister, is a whole piece built over this fault line in Beethoven's second, trying to peer into the gap.... The best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven's concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out." The New Yorker called the work "deeply complex" and "extraordinarily confident," noting that "the ease with which Andres absorbs these influences simultaneously reveals two ineffable qualities necessary to the mind of a mature artist: perseverance, and regret."

Courtney Lewis returns to the New York Philharmonic following his tenure as Assistant Conductor, 2014-16. The Star Tribune wrote that he "drew precise, energetic and persuasive performances" in a 2014 appearance with the Minnesota Orchestra.

The Saturday Matinee Concert on April 22 at 2:00 p.m. opens with the New York Philharmonic Principal Brass Quintet performing an all-American program featuring Anthony DiLorenzo's Fire Dance, Michael Tilson Thomas's Street Song, and Bruce Broughton's Three American Portraits. In these performances, the New York Philharmonic Principal Brass Quintet features Principal Trumpet Christopher Martin, Associate Principal Trumpet Matthew Muckey, Associate Principal Horn Richard Deane, Associate Principal Trombone Colin Williams, and Principal Tuba Alan Baer. The rest of the program features selections from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet and Elgar's In the South (Alassio), conducted by Mr. Lewis.

Artists
The 2016-17 season marks Courtney Lewis's second as music director of the Jacksonville Symphony. Previous appointments have included Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic (2014-16); associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, where he made his subscription debut in the 2011-12 season; and Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he debuted in 2011. From 2008 to 2014, Mr. Lewis was the music director of Boston's acclaimed Discovery Ensemble, a chamber orchestra dedicated not only to giving concerts of contemporary and established repertoire at the highest level of musical and technical excellence, but also bringing live music into the least privileged parts of Boston with workshops in local schools. In the 2016-17 season he makes his debuts with the Dallas Symphony and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, and returns to the Colorado Symphony. Highlights of his 2015-16 season included debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Royal Flemish Philharmonic, and Colorado Symphony, as well as assisting Thomas Adès at the Salzburg Festival for the World Premiere of Mr. Adès's opera The Exterminating Angel. Courtney Lewis made his major American orchestral debut in November 2008 with the St. Louis Symphony, and has since appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, and the Atlanta, National, Detroit, Vancouver, and Houston symphony orchestras. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Courtney Lewis studied music at the University of Cambridge, during which time he studied composition with Robin Holloway and clarinet with Dame Thea King. After completing a master's degree with a focus on the late music of György Ligeti, he attended the Royal Northern College of Music, where his teachers included Mark Elder and Clark Rundell. Courtney Lewis made his New York Philharmonic debut leading a November 2014 Young People's Concert; he most recently led the Orchestra in another Young People's Concert in May 2016. These concerts mark his New York Philharmonic subscription debut.

This season pianist Jonathan Biss continues his latest Beethoven project, Beethoven/5, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has co-commissioned five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven's. The five-year plan began last season, with Mr. Biss premiering Timo Andres's Piano Concerto No. 3, The Blind Banister, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 2016-17 Mr. Biss begins examining, both in performance and academically, the concept of a composer's "late style," and has put together programs of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Elgar, Gesualdo, György Kurtág, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann's later works, both for solo piano and in collaboration with the Brentano Quartet and Mark Padmore. He also gives master classes at Carnegie Hall in connection with the idea of late style, and published a Kindle Single on the topic in March 2017. Mr. Biss performs a diverse repertoire ranging from Mozart and Beethoven through the Romantics to Janá?ek and Schoenberg, as well as works by Kurtág and commissions from David Ludwig, Leon Kirchner, Lewis Spratlan, and Bernard Rands. In 2017 he releases the sixth volume of his nine-year, nine-disc recording cycle of Beethoven's complete piano sonatas. Jonathan Biss studied at Indiana University and at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he joined the piano faculty in 2010. He led the first massive open online course (MOOC) offered by a classical music conservatory, Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, which has reached more than 150,000 people in 185 countries, and he will continue to add lectures until he covers all the sonatas. His bestselling eBook Beethoven's Shadow, published by RosettaBooks in 2011, was the first Kindle Single written by a classical musician. Mr. Biss made his New York Philharmonic debut in February 2001 performing Beethoven's Fantasia in C minor, conducted by Kurt Masur. He most recently joined the Orchestra for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, led by Andris Nelsons in February 2011.

Repertoire
On first encountering the works of William Shakespeare, composer Hector Berlioz (1803-69) was smitten with the playwright's soaring poetry and dramatic potency. He was also smitten with Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whose Juliet and Ophelia he witnessed in Paris (and who inspired Berlioz's much-loved Symphonie fantastique); he fell in love with the star from the audience, and eventually married her, although the union would turn out to be an unhappy one. Berlioz wrote a variety of works based on Shakespeare's plays, among them the opera Béatrice et Bénédict (which takes its name from the witty, warring lovers in Much Ado About Nothing). The composer was forever mixing genres, and his Romeo and Juliet reflects an unusual amalgam of styles: a poster for its November 1839 premiere described it as a "symphonie dramatique," and indeed the complete work is a programmatic, large-scale choral symphony with a libretto by Émile Deschamps. Berlioz considered the completed work one of his best, saying, "If you now ask me which of my pieces I prefer, my answer will be that I share the view of most artists: I prefer the adagio (the Love Scene) in Romeo and Juliet." The New York Philharmonic first performed selections from Romeo and Juliet in April 1867, led by Carl Bergmann, and the Orchestra most recently performed the complete work in October 2003, conducted by Lorin Maazel.

Timo Andres (b. 1985) composed his Piano Concerto No. 3, The Blind Banister, in the summer of 2015 as part of Jonathan Biss's Beethoven/5 project, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has commissioned five composers to write new works, each based on one of Beethoven's five piano concertos. Taking its name from a line in Tomas Tranströmer's poem Schubertiana, The Blind Banister is inspired by Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, the cadenza of which Beethoven reworked about 20 years after he first wrote it, around the same time he was working on his Emperor Concerto. In his note, Mr. Andres writes of this cadenza: "It's wonderfully jarring in that he makes no concessions to his earlier style; for a couple of minutes, we're plucked from a world of conventional gestures into a future-world of obsessive fugues and spiraling modulations. Like any good cadenza, it's made from those same simple gestures - an arpeggiated triad, a sequence of downward scales - but uses them as the basis for a miniature fantasia." Of his own piece, Mr. Andres says: "The Blind Banister is a whole piece built over this fault line in Beethoven's second, trying to peer into the gap. I tried as much as possible to start with those same extremely simple elements Beethoven uses; however, my piece is not a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest. It doesn't even directly quote Beethoven. There are some surface similarities to his concerto (a three-movement structure, a B-flat tonal center) but these are mostly red herrings. The best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven's concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out." The Blind Banister was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic performed the New York Premiere of Timo Andres's Early to Rise as part of CONTACT!, the new-music series, in November 2014 and reprised it on the EUROPE / SPRING 2015 tour. The Philharmonic also presented the New York Premiere of Mr. Andres's Comfort Food and the World Premiere of Winding Stair during the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) may have premiered his Piano Concerto No. 2 at his public debut during a charity event at Vienna's Burgtheater for musicians' widows and orphans in 1795; according to accounts, he worked on the score until the last minute, completing it a mere two days before the performance, and the solo part was not fully written out (a situation he would repeat with future works). This concerto was actually composed before his so-called Piano Concerto No. 1 - the numbering is derived from the order in which the concertos were published - Beethoven worked on the piece sporadically throughout the 1790s (even perhaps as early as 1788) and he withheld it from publication until 1801 while it underwent frequent and considerable revisions. This concerto is strongly reminiscent of the Mozart piano concertos Beethoven admired at the time, though it has a more robust orchestration and a bit more drama, for while he admired his predecessor, he wanted to make his own mark. The Orchestra's first presentation of the Piano Concerto No. 2 was in 1920, when Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony (which later merged with the Philharmonic) and pianist Alfred Cortot at Carnegie Hall; Alan Gilbert conducted the work's most recent complete performance, with Yefim Bronfman as soloist, in June 2014 as part of The Beethoven Piano Concertos: A Philharmonic Festival.

On a holiday visit to the Italian Riviera in the winter of 1903-04, Edward Elgar (1857-1904) composed the concert overture In the South (Alassio), after the town where the Elgar family stayed. The work was inspired by the history and scenery of the area; while walking in the nearby countryside, the composer wrote, "in a flash it all came to me - the conflict of the armies on that very spot long ago, where now I stood - the contrast of the ruin and the shepherd - and then, all of a sudden, I came back to reality. In that time I had composed the overture - the rest was merely writing it down." The New York Philharmonic first performed In the South (Alassio) in November 1904, when Walter Damrosch conducted the work with the New York Symphony (which later merged with the New York Philharmonic to form today's New York Philharmonic), and most recently in November 2009, conducted by Riccardo Muti.