Joshua Gersen To Lead NY Philharmonic in All-American Program

Assistant Conductor Joshua Gersen will conduct the New York Philharmonic in a program of 20th-century American works: Barber's Adagio for Strings, Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Copland's Symphony No. 3, Thursday, February 22, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, February 23 at 8:00 p.m.; and Saturday, February 24 at 8:00 p.m.

Barber orchestrated his Adagio for Strings two years before Leonard Bernstein studied with Copland; Bernstein and Copland became life-long friends, and Bernstein championed Copland's music at the Philharmonic and beyond. Bernstein conducted the Philharmonic in Copland's Third Symphony 33 times, and Barber's Adagio for Strings twice, including in a January 1981 program featuring works by Copland. The Philharmonic gave the World Premiere of Symphonic Dances from West Side Storyin 1961 at a Valentine concert for Bernstein that he attended, which also featured Copland conducting Bernstein's CandideOverture. Copland led the Philharmonic in his Third Symphony three times, including a Young People's Concert also led by Bernstein.

This program complements Bernstein's Philharmonic: A Centennial Festival, October-November 2017, which celebrated the former Philharmonic Music Director and Laureate Conductor on the centennial of his birth.

Philharmonic Free Fridays

The New York Philharmonic is offering 100 free tickets to young people ages 13-26 for the concert Friday, February 23 as part of Philharmonic Free Fridays. Philharmonic Free Fridays offers a limited number of free tickets to 13-26-year-olds to many of the 2017-18 season's Friday subscription concerts. Information on the 2017-18 season of Free Fridays is available at nyphil.org/freefridays.

Artists
Joshua Gersen, New York Philharmonic Assistant Conductor since September 2015, made his acclaimed Philharmonic subscription debut on hours' notice in February 2017. Mr. Gersen has been music director of the New York Youth Symphony for the past five years, and he was previously the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony, where he served as the assistant conductor to the symphony's artistic director, Michael Tilson Thomas, leading the orchestra in various subscription, education, and family concerts including the orchestra's PULSE concert series. He made his conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony in the fall of 2013 and has been invited back to conduct a variety of concerts, including a performance in the new SoundBox Theater and filling in for Michael Tilson Thomas on part of a subscription series. The winner of the Aspen Music Festival's 2011 Aspen Conducting Prize and the 2010 Robert J. Harth Conducting Prize, Mr. Gersen served as the festival's assistant conductor for the 2012 summer season under Robert Spano. He was principal conductor of the Ojai Music Festival in 2013, and has conducted the National, Toronto, New Jersey, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Alabama symphony orchestras and members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He was also a recipient of a Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award in 2015 and 2016. Mr. Gersen is also an avid composer; his String Quartet No. 1 and Fantasy for Chamber Orchestra have been premiered in New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall. He has had works performed by the New Mexico Symphony, Greater Bridgeport Symphony, and Greater Bridgeport Youth Orchestra. His work as a composer has inspired an interest in conducting contemporary music, and he has led several World Premieres by young composers with New York Youth Symphony's First Music Program and the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program. He has also collaborated with prominent composers including John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Steven Mackey, Mason Bates, and Michael Gandolfi. Joshua Gersen made his conducting debut at age 11 with the Greater Bridgeport Youth Orchestra and his professional conducting debut five years later when he led the Greater Bridgeport Symphony in a performance of his own composition, A Symphonic Movement. He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied conducting with Otto Werner Mueller, and the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied composition with Michael Gandolfi. Since becoming an Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he has led the Orchestra in 18 Young People's Concerts and Young People's Concerts for Schools.

Repertoire
Samuel Barber (1910-81) began work on what would become the Adagio for Strings in 1936, when he created the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, while traveling in Italy and Austria. In a September 1936 letter he wrote: "I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today - it is a knockout!" Though it took him some time to finish the quartet (he rewrote the finale over several years), he felt that the slow movement was perfect from the start; two years later he arranged it as the stand-alone Adagio for Strings for five-part string orchestra. It was first performed by the NBC Symphony, led by Arturo Toscanini, on a November 1938 radio broadcast, and the piece was an immediate hit. It was later performed at the state funerals of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, and is on the sound track of Oliver Stone's Vietnam War film Platoon.Aaron Copland said of the Adagio for Strings in a 1982 BBC interview: "It's really well felt, it's believable, you see, it's not phoney. ... It comes straight from the heart, to use old-fashioned terms. ... [I]t makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it." The Philharmonic's first performance of the Adagio for Strings was on a June 1939 Stadium Concert led by Massimo Freccia; the Orchestra most recently performed it in tribute to the victims of the Orlando tragedy and their families in Central Park on the opening concert of the June 2016 Concerts in the Parks.

Discussions about the creation of West Side Story began in early 1949, but the show itself - with music by Leonard Bernstein (1918-90), a book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and choreography by Jerome Robbins - was put aside in favor of other projects, notably Bernstein's Candide. West Side Story finally came to life in August 1957 as a tale of conflict between two teenage gangs in the Manhattan neighborhood that would be razed a few years later to make way for Lincoln Center. In early 1961, while preparing for a New York Philharmonic pension fund benefit gala to be held the night before Valentine's Day, Bernstein revisited the show's score and extracted nine sections to create his Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. His colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal (who had just completed the orchestration for the film version of the musical) made some suggestions, and Bernstein re-ordered the extracts into an uninterrupted, music-driven work. The piece was given its World Premiere during that February 13, 1961, concert: A Valentine for Leonard Bernstein, led by Lukas Foss. The Philharmonic's most recent complete performance was on July 2017, conducted by Bramwell Tovey during the Orchestra's annual residency at Bravo! Vail.

Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Aaron Copland (1900-90) composed his Symphony No. 3 between 1944 and 1946 (as World War II was coming to a close) and dedicated it to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky's first wife, Natalie. The Third Symphony is Copland's longest orchestral composition - a four-movement work lasting 40 minutes, with a dramatic first movement, a scherzo, a slow movement, and a finale into which he incorporated his Fanfare for the Common Man, originally written in 1942. Copland wrote: "I used this opportunity to carry the Fanfare material further and to satisfy my desire to give the Third Symphony an affirmative tone. After all, it was a wartime piece - or more accurately, an end-of-war piece - intended to reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time." Copland's aim was apparently successful, as Bernstein remarked that "The [Third] Symphony has become an American monument, like the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial." The New York Philharmonic's first performance of this symphony was in December 1947, conducted by George Szell. The most recent complete performances were in March 2008, led by Michael Christie.