NY Phil Presents SUMMERTIME CLASSICS Conducted by Bramwell Tovey, Now thru 7/7

Mr. Tovey, who is entering his 13th season as music director of the Vancouver Symphony and continues as founding host and conductor of the New York Philharmonic's Summertime Classics series, also continues his association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. In 2008, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic co-commissioned him to write a new work, Urban Runway, which the New York Philharmonic premiered on Summertime Classics that year and which was subsequently programmed by a number of orchestras in the United States and Canada. Mr. Tovey has worked as guest conductor with orchestras in the U.S. and Europe including the London Philharmonic, London Symphony, and Frankfurt Radio orchestras. In North America, he has made guest appearances with the orchestras of Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Seattle, and Montreal as well as ongoing performances with the Toronto Symphony, which commissioned and premiered his trumpet concerto in 2009 as a preview of his first full-length opera, The Inventor, premiered in Calgary in 2011. In 2011 he returned to The Philadelphia Orchestra for its summer series in Saratoga, New York, and made debuts with The Cleveland Orchestra (where he returns again this summer) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to which he returned in the winter of 2012 and will revisit this summer. He will also tour the West Coast with the Vancouver Symphony in the winter of 2013.

Bramwell Tovey's honors included a fellowship from the Royal Academy of Music in London, honorary doctorates from the universities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Kwantlen University College, as well as a Royal Conservatory of Music Fellowship in Toronto. In 1999 Mr. Tovey received the M. Joan Chalmers National Award for Artistic Direction, a Canadian prize awarded to artists for outstanding contributions in the performing arts.

Joseph Alessi was appointed the New York Philharmonic's Principal Trombone, the Gurnee f. and Marjorie L. Hart Chair, in the spring of 1985. He began musical studies with his father, Joseph Alessi, Sr., as a high school student in California, and was a soloist with the San Francisco Symphony before continuing his musical training at The Curtis Institute of Music. Prior to joining the Philharmonic, Mr. Alessi was second trombone of The Philadelphia Orchestra for four seasons, and principal trombone of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra for one season. He has performed as guest principal trombonist with the London Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, led by Pierre Boulez.

Mr. Alessi is an active soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. In April 1990 he made his New York Philharmonic solo debut, performing Creston's Fantasy for Trombone, and in 1992 premiered Christopher Rouse's Pulitzer Prize-winning Trombone Concerto with the Philharmonic, which commissioned the work for its 150th anniversary celebration. He has been a guest soloist with the National Repertory Orchestra, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Mannheim National Theater Orchestra, National Symphony of Taiwan, and the Hague Philharmonic, among others. He is a founding member of the Summit Brass ensemble at the Rafael Mendez Brass Institute in Tempe, Arizona. In 2002 Mr. Alessi was awarded an International Trombone Association Award for his contributions to the world of trombone music and trombone playing.

Repertoire

Bramwell Tovey wrote The Lincoln Tunnel Cabaret in 2006 for New York Philharmonic Principal Trombone Joseph Alessi. In the liner notes to a recording of the piece, Tovey writes: "The listener might imagine that Joe, who commutes daily from New Jersey to Manhattan in his stylish open-top sports car, gets stuck in traffic at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel and decides to get out his 'horn' (as he calls it) and entertain the disgruntled crowd. In New York, anything can happen.... Under a cocktail of jazz and minimalism, motives from the opening of the work provide the main musical material. The soloist is put through many virtuosic hoops until a final cadenza brings the piece full circle. Like all traffic jams, this one seems to disperse quickly for no apparent reason." These concerts mark the World Premiere of the orchestral version of this work.

Leonard Bernstein's "comic operetta" Candide premiered on Broadway in 1956. The production flopped, but the music was highly praised, and the original cast album became a cult hit. Seventeen years later a new production, with a new libretto, fared better. With Bernstein becoming Music Director in 1958, music from Candide has become a New York Philharmonic staple. This is the premiere of Clare Grundman's Candide Suite, arranged for band.

John Philip Sousa composed songs, suites, dances, and several notable operettas, but he is best known for his band marches, which earned him the nickname "The March King." Within the strictures of the traditional quickstep march, Sousa was able to create a striking diversity of character and effect, and his 135 marches are remarkable for their variety and melodic invention. With their rousing energy and patriotic titles, Sousa's marches are quintessential Americana. Inspired by the phrase "A sudden thought strikes me; let us swear eternal friendship," Sousa composed Hands Across the Sea to express the U.S.'s friendship with its allies abroad, and The Glory of the Yankee Navy is based on material from the 1909 musical comedy The Yankee Girl. The program also features The Liberty Bell march, well known to many as the theme music for Monty Python's Flying Circus. The New York Symphony (which merged with the New York Philharmonic in 1928 to form today's New York Philharmonic) first performed marches by Sousa in June 1901 in Philadelphia, conducted by Walter Damrosch. Sousa marches were last performed by the Philharmonic in July 2012 during Summertime Classics.

Program II, "The Planets" (July 5-7, 2013)
John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a celebration of that American invention and innovation, the automobile. The work conveys the exhilaration of a passenger in a very fast sports car, and the unbounded rhythmic energy and kaleidoscopic color are what "drive" the work. The insistent, perpetual motion of the percussion and winds thrust the movement forward, while the strings and brass engage in percussive and increasingly frenzied exclamations. The Philharmonic first performed the piece in September 1991, conducted by Kurt Masur. Its most recent performance was in July 2004, led by Bramwell Tovey.

Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) is an opéra-féerie - a French genre of opera or opéra-ballet based on fairy tales - by Jacques Offenbach. It was loosely based on Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon. The "Ballet of the Snowflakes" at the end of Act III sparked the popularity of snow dances, the most famous example of which is in The Nutcracker. This is the Philharmonic's first performance of any music from the overall work.

Austrian composer Josef Strauss was the son of Johann Strauss I and the brother of Johann Strauss II. In true Strauss form, he wrote many waltzes, including Music of the Spheres. Critics consider it one of his finest works, showing skillful and colorful orchestration as well as harmonic inventiveness that could have fueled efforts outside the waltz form so closely linked to his family heritage. Erich Kleiber conducted the Philharmonic's first performance in November 1930, and Franz Allers, the most recent, in June 1961.

Gustav Holst struggled for many years to build a career as a composer, and it was only with the premiere of The Planets that he gained popular success. Based on Holst's understanding of astrology, the work is a highly descriptive tour of the heavens, evoking the distinctive attributes assigned to each planet - Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune - in colorful character sketches. "Mars" so forcefully evoked the terrors of war that listeners at an informal performance in 1918 were certain that the music depicted World War I, although Holst had completed the section before the war began. In this program, the Philharmonic performs the piece accompanied by a screening of The Planets - An HD Odyssey, a high-definition film commissioned by the Houston Symphony and created by filmmaker Duncan Copp in cooperation with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories that features images from modern space exploration, including photographs from rovers and satellites, created explicitly to accompany the Holst work. The Planets was first performed by the New York Philharmonic in December 1921, conducted by Albert Coates, and was most recently performed in February 2004, led by Lorin Maazel.