Edward Gardner To Make NY Philharmonic Debut With Artist-in-Residence Leif Ove Andsnes

Edward Gardner will make his New York Philharmonic debut conducting Debussy's Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra, featuring The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence Leif Ove Andsnes in his final appearances with the Orchestra in that role. The program will also include Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra and Sibelius's Pohjola's Daughter. The performances will take place on Thursday, April 26, 2018, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 28 at 8:00 p.m.; they will perform the same program at Long Island University's Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, April 27 at 8:00 p.m.

Leif Ove Andsnes also performs Debussy's Fantaisie this season with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Oslo Philharmonic, and New World Symphony. The pianist said: "Written by the 28-year-old Claude Debussy, his Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (1890) is another very rarely performed piece, in what seems to be my season of neglected piano concertos. There is so much beauty in the Fantaisie, its slow music feeling like a warm-up for his ingenious Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which would appear four years later."

Leif Ove Andsnes's appearances as Artist-in-Residence throughout the 2017-18 season mark his only performances in New York City this season. His final appearance as Artist-in-Residence will be a recital on May 2, 2018.

Edward Gardner and Leif Ove Andsnes have previously collaborated on performances of Schumann's Piano Concerto (January 2016) and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4 (season-opening concerts, September 2017) with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Mr. Gardner is chief conductor.

Artists
Chief conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra since October 2015, Edward Gardner has led the orchestra on multiple international tours, including performances in London, Berlin, Munich, and Amsterdam. Its semi-staged production of Britten's Peter Grimes at the 2017 Edinburgh International Festival received five-star reviews from The Times, The Telegraph, The Observer, The Scotsman, and The Herald. In the 2017-18 season Mr. Gardner makes his debuts with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and returns to the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He also continues longstanding collaborations with London's Philharmonia Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (where he was principal guest conductor from 2010 to 2016), and BBC Symphony Orchestra (which he has conducted at both the First and Last Night of the BBC Proms). Music director of English National Opera for ten years (2006-15), Mr. Gardner continues to work with the world's major opera companies. He has ongoing relationships with Milan's Teatro alla Scala, Opéra national de Paris, and The Metropolitan Opera, where he has conducted productions of Bizet's Carmen, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Massenet's Werther. Future plans include a return to Dutch National Opera and his Royal Opera, Covent Garden, debut. A passionate supporter of young talent, he founded the Hallé Youth Orchestra in 2002 and regularly conducts the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the Barbican Youth Orchestra. He has a close relationship with The Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music, which appointed him its inaugural Sir Charles Mackerras conducting chair in 2014. Mr. Gardner is an exclusive Chandos recording artist; his award-winning discography includes music by Janá?ek, Elgar, Mendelssohn, Walton, Lutos?awski, Britten, Berio, and Schoenberg. His recent recording of Sibelius orchestral songs with the Bergen Philharmonic was shortlisted for a 2017 Gramophone Award. Born in Gloucester in 1974, Edward Gardner was educated at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music. Upon graduating he assisted Mark Elder at The Hallé, then spent three years as music director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He has since conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Orchestre national de France, National Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and Filarmonica della Scala. His accolades include being named Royal Philharmonic Society Award Conductor of the Year (2008), an Olivier for Outstanding Achievement in Opera (2009), and an OBE for Services to Music in the Queen's Birthday Honors (2012). These performances mark his New York Philharmonic debut.

Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is the 2017-18 Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. Acclaimed for his commanding technique and searching interpretations, he performs recitals and concertos in the world's leading concert halls and with today's foremost orchestras, and is an active recording artist. An avid chamber musician, he is the founding director of the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival, was co-artistic director of the Risør Festival of Chamber Music for almost two decades, and served as music director of California's 2012 Ojai Music Festival. Mr. Andsnes was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2013, and received honorary doctorates from New York's Juilliard School and Norway's University of Bergen in 2016 and 2017, respectively. He now records exclusively for Sony Classical. His earlier discography comprises more than 30 discs for EMI Classics - solo, chamber, and concerto releases, many of them bestsellers - spanning repertoire from J.S. Bach to the present day. He recently completed Beethoven Journey with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which he led the orchestra from the keyboard in Beethoven's five concertos in residencies around the world, a multiple-season project recorded for Sony Classics. A frequent collaborator with the New York Philharmonic, as Artist-in-Residence Mr. Andsnes performs chamber music, a solo recital, Britten's Piano Concerto (1945 version) led by Antonio Pappano, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4 led by Paavo Järvi, and Debussy's Fantaisie led by Edward Gardner. These concertos figure prominently in his 2017-18 programming: he plays the Britten with orchestras including Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Rachmaninoff with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestras; and Debussy with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Oslo Philharmonic, and New World Symphony. He embarks on an extensive European recital tour with a program featuring selected pieces by Sibelius, whose rarely performed solo piano oeuvre is also the focus of his recent Sony Classical release. Leif Ove Andsnes made his New York Philharmonic debut in February 1997 performing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, conducted by Neeme Järvi. He most recently joined the Orchestra for Britten's Piano Concerto, led by Antonio Pappano, in February 2018.

Repertoire
Pohjola's Daughter is one of a series of tone poems that Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) composed based on episodes of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic first published in 1835, but based on ancient Finnish and Karelian folk songs and legends. Pohjola is the name for the Finnish north country, sometimes identified as Lapland. It tells the story of the Finnish hero Väinämöinen, a powerful, elderly adventurer, who meets the maiden of Pohjola, who agrees to come down to him from her rainbow if he will fashion a boat for her out of the pieces of her magic spindle. Väinämöinen fails to find the proper magic formula or incantation, and continues his homeward journey. Sibelius completed Pohjola's Daughter in 1906, and conducted the first performance in St. Petersburg in December of that year. Albert Stoessel conducted the work's Philharmonic premiere in March 1940; its most recent performance was in April 2002, led by Colin Davis.

Written in 1889 and 1890 as part of Claude Debussy's (1862-1918) work in connection with his Prix de Rome duties at the Paris Conservatoire, the Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra was never performed during his lifetime - though he made revisions from time to time, he was never satisfied with the piece, and it was published only after his death. Yet it's a delightful work that is grounded in his early musical influences and foreshadows the sonorities that would become a hallmark of Debussy's sound. It is the closest he ever came to writing a piano concerto, but rather than placing the instrument as the traditional soloist, the piano is an equal partner with the orchestra. Dedicated to pianist René Chansarel (who would have been the pianist at the cancelled 1890 premiere), the Fantaisie was finally premiered in 1918, after Debussy's death. The Philharmonic first presented it in February 1921, with Alfred Cortot as pianist and led by Walter Damrosch. It was most recently presented in November 2003, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as soloist and led by David Robertson.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945), forced to flee Hungary as National Socialism overtook Central Europe in the fall of 1940, arrived with his family in New York, where he would spend his five remaining years. At the instigation of conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti - both similarly displaced Hungarians - conductor Serge Koussevitzky offered Bartók a commission for a new symphonic work under the auspices of his newly established Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Bartók wrote the Concerto for Orchestra in 1943 at a rural mountain getaway at upstate New York's Saranac Lake; it was premiered in December 1944. In his note, Bartók explained: "The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertant or soloistic manner. The 'virtuoso' treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments) or in the perpetuum mobile-like passage of the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and especially in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages." The Philharmonic first performed the Concerto for Orchestra in January 1946, conducted by George Szell; the most recent performance was in February 2013, led by Andris Nelsons.

Programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Tickets
Single tickets for this performance start at $29. Tickets for Open Rehearsals are $22. Tickets may be purchased online at nyphil.org or by calling (212) 875-5656, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday; 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Saturday; and noon to 5:00 p.m. Sunday. Tickets may also be purchased at the David Geffen Hall Box Office. The Box Office opens at 10:00 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and at noon on Sunday. On performance evenings, the Box Office closes one-half hour after performance time; other evenings it closes at 6:00 p.m. A limited number of $18 tickets for select concerts may be available for students within 10 days of the performance at nyphil.org, or in person the day of. Valid identification is required. To determine ticket availability, call the Philharmonic's Customer Relations Department at (212) 875-5656. (Ticket prices subject to change.)