Semyon Bychkov Conducts New York Philharmonic in Mahler This Weekend

Semyon Bychkov will return to the New York Philharmonic to conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 6, tonight, February 11, 2016, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, February 12 at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, February 13 at 8:00 p.m.; and Tuesday, February 16 at 7:30 p.m.

The New York Philharmonic gave the U.S. Premiere of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in December 1947, led by Dimitri Mitropoulos; the marked score he used is available in the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives. The program is among several in the 2015-16 season to feature works by Gustav Mahler, Philharmonic Music Director from 1909 to 1911.

Semyon Bychkov led acclaimed performances of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in August 2011. The Guardian wrote of the performance: "While he's the last conductor to wear his heart on his sleeve, that heart was clearly beating throughout. What impressed throughout the 85-minute span of the piece was the tension and cohesion Bychkov maintained until the final crushing bars and even afterwards into the long ensuing silence. His command of the score ... was absolute." Mr. Bychkov appeared with the New York Philharmonic earlier this season, in October 2015, leading works by Brahms and Detlev Glanert.

The 2015-16 season will also feature performances of Mahler's Symphony No. 9, led by Bernard Haitink, April 14-16 and 19, 2016; Das Lied von der Erde, led by Music Director Alan Gilbert and featuring tenor Stefan Vinke (in his Philharmonic debut) and baritone Thomas Hampson, a former Philharmonic Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, April 20-21, 2016; and selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, led by John Storgards in his Philharmonic debut and featuring The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence Eric Owens as soloist, May 12-14, 2016.

To complement these performances, the New York Philharmonic's free Insights at the Atrium series, in association with NYU Steinhardt, will present "Stepping Inside Mahler's Sixth," Wednesday, February 10, 2016, at 7:30 p.m. Using Philharmonic recordings of Mahler's Sixth Symphony led by Music Directors Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, Lorin Maazel, and Alan Gilbert as well as marked conducting scores from the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives, Professor S. Alex Ruthmann and his team from the New York University Music Experience Design Lab have developed a new app that allows users to explore scores and audio, elucidating what specifically distinguishes each performance. Interactive iPad stations will allow attendees to "test drive" the app at this media-rich event featuring Prof. Ruthmann, music historian Erik Ryding, Philharmonic Audio Director Lawrence Rock, and Philharmonic Archivist / Historian Barbara Haws, who has spearheaded the digitization of the rich Philharmonic Archives through the Leon Levy Digital Archives project. The event takes place at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (Columbus Avenue at 62nd Street) and is co- presented with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Related Events:

- Philharmonic Free Fridays
The New York Philharmonic is offering 100 free tickets for young people ages 13-26 to the concert Friday, February 12 as part of Philharmonic Free Fridays. Information is available at nyphil.org/freefridays. Philharmonic Free Fridays offers 100 free tickets to 13-26-year-olds to each of the 2015-16 season's 15 Friday evening subscription concerts.

- Pre-Concert Insights
Composer Victoria Bond will introduce the program. Pre-Concert Insights are $7, and discounts are available for three (3) or more talks and for students. They take place one hour before these performances in the Helen Hull Room, unless otherwise noted. Attendance is limited to 90 people. Information: nyphil.org/preconcert or (212) 875-5656.

- Insights at the Atrium - "Stepping Inside Mahler's Sixth"
S. Alex Ruthmann of the New York University Music Experience Design Lab, speaker Music historian Erik Ryding, speaker
New York Philharmonic Audio Director Lawrence Rock, speaker
Philharmonic Archivist / Historian Barbara Haws, moderator
Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (Columbus Avenue at 62nd Street)
Insights at the Atrium events are free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first- come, first-served basis. Subscribers, Friends at the Fellow level and above, and Patrons may secure guaranteed admission by emailing AdultEd@nyphil.org. Space is limited.

Artists:

Semyon Bychkov won the Rachmaninov Conducting Competition at age 20, but after being denied the prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic, he left the former Soviet Union two years later. By the time he returned in 1989 to be principal guest conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic he had been recognized for his concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and had enjoyed success as music director of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic. He has since served as music director of the Orchestre de Paris (1989-1998) and chief conductor of Cologne's WDR Symphony Orchestra (1997-2010) and Dresden Semperoper (1998). In addition to regular appearances at the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra della Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI Torino, Orchestre National de France, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mr. Bychkov's symphonic engagements include annual tours with the Munich and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. His repertoire spans the music of four centuries. In the opera house Mr. Bychkov is recognized for his interpretations of Richard Strauss, Wagner, and Verdi. While principal guest conductor of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, his productions of Jana?c?ek's Jenu?fa, Schubert's Fierrabras, Puccini's La bohe?me, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Musorgsky's Boris Godunov were awarded the prestigious Premio Abbiati. Most recently he conducted Musorgsky's Khovanshchina at the Vienna Staatsoper, and over next season he will conduct Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and Wagner's Parsifal at Madrid's Teatro Real. Mr. Bychkov's recordings with Philips include discs with the Berlin and London Philharmonic Orchestras, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London's Philharmonia Orchestra, and Orchestre de Paris, which were followed by a series of benchmark recordings with Cologne's WDR Symphony Orchestra, including a cycle of Brahms's complete symphonies; works by Richard Strauss, Mahler, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Verdi, Detlev Glanert, and York Ho?ller; and a recording of Wagner's Lohengrin, which was voted BBC Music Magazine's Record of the Year. Semyon Bychkov currently holds the Klemperer Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Gu?nter Wand Conducting Chair with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with which he appears annually at the BBC Proms. The International Opera Awards named him 2015's Conductor of the Year. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in March 1984 leading a program of Beethoven, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff; he most recently led the Orchestra in works by Brahms, with soloists Lisa Batiashvili and Gautier Capuc?on, and Detlev Glanert in October 2015.

Insights at the Atrium Speakers:

The New York University Music Experience Design Lab (MusEDLab) researches and co- designs new technologies for music making, learning, and engagement together with young people, educators, non-profits, and industry partners. The MusEDLab focuses on innovations that lower barriers to creative expression, encourage playful music making and learning, and create "sticky" experiences directly with the music and media people love.

S. Alex Ruthmann is associate professor of Music Education and Music Technology in the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions at NYU Steinhardt. Prof. Ruthmann teaches courses at the intersection of music, education, technology, design, and entrepreneurship, and leads the Music Experience Design Lab (MusEDLab). Since joining NYU, he has collaborated on projects with the New York Philharmonic, Aeolus String Quartet, Chamber Music Society of Detroit, P2PU.org, Peter Gabriel, Soundfly, Thelonious Monk Foundation, and the Urban Arts Partnership. He works collaboratively with student and faculty researchers in the NYU Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL) on applying basic research in music technology to educational experiences.

Erik Ryding is the author of In Harmony Framed and coauthor, with Rebecca Pechefsky, of the award-winning biography Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (Yale University Press). He also wrote the introduction to the recent Dover reprint of Bruno Walter's book Gustav Mahler. His dissertation was on Renaissance music and poetry, and for years he taught English at Columbia and Barnard. He left academia in 1993 to pursue music, and worked in the music business until 2008, when he pursued his own projects. His articles and reviews have appeared in Current Musicology, Classic Record Collector, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Shakespeare Quarterly, and other publications, and he has written liner notes for numerous recording labels. He served as Editorial Coordinator for the New York Philharmonic's10-CD box set The Mahler Broadcasts (1998). Currently a producer of videos and audio recordings, he served for years as managing editor and senior editor of publications at Carnegie Hall. Also a practicing musician, he has performed on the lute on both coasts of the U.S. and has toured in Europe; his recording Great Wonder, with soprano Amanda Sidebottom, was released in 2014 to critical praise.

Lawrence Rock, Audio Director of the New York Philharmonic since 1997, oversees all of the Orchestra's audio activities including recording, broadcasting, and live sound. He is the recording and mastering engineer as well as a producer for the digital recording series produced and distributed by the New York Philharmonic. His other recent projects have included producing New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel: The Complete Mahler Symphonies, Live; Deutsche Grammophon's New York Philharmonic DG Concerts downloads; and a Deutsche Grammophon recording of music by Richard Strauss, performed by the Philharmonic. In 2005 Mr. Rock received three Grammy Awards for John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, for which he served as co-producer with the composer, and in 1997 he won a Grammy for engineering an album of works by Aaron Copland, performed by the St. Louis Symphony. For the Philharmonic's own recording label, New York Philharmonic Special Editions, Mr. Rock co- produced the Grammy-nominated CD Sweeney Todd: Live at the New York Philharmonic and the 10-CD set Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic. He has also made recordings with the Chicago, Houston, and Milwaukee symphony orchestras.

Barbara Haws has been the Archivist / Historian of the New York Philharmonic since 1984. Ms. Haws, who has a master's degree in history from New York University, has lectured extensively about the Philharmonic's past and has curated major exhibitions in New York and Europe. In the fall of 2003 she mounted the largest-ever multimedia exhibition on the Philharmonic's history, which opened at the UBS Art Gallery and moved to Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall). In addition to speaking at New York Philharmonic Pre-Concert Insights, Ms. Haws has lectured at Bard College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Grolier Club. In 1995 she became the Executive Producer of the Philharmonic's Special Editions record label, which released award-winning and Grammy-nominated CD collections, including the 12-CD set The Mahler Broadcasts:1948-1982; the 10-CD set Bernstein LIVE (released October 2000); and the first new recording in 20 years of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: Live at the New York Philharmonic. She has served as president of the Archivist Round Table of Metropolitan New York, is a founder of New York Archives Week, and chairs the Board Archives Committee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Barbara Haws, along with Burton Bernstein, is the author of Leonard Bernstein: American Original, published in September 2008 by Harper Collins. She leads the effort to digitize 1.3 million pages of archival material, funded by the Leon Levy Foundation and available online at archives.nyphil.org.

Repertoire:

Gustav Mahler's (1860-1911) Symphony No. 6 at one point carried the subtitle "Tragic," a word that aptly suits the work's overriding sense of doom. Though 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 soon experience: 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, would later comment that she believed no other work had been so directly personal to him. 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 symphony's World Premiere 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, led by Dimitri Mitropoulos, and most recently performed it in May 2012, conducted by Music Director Alan Gilbert.

Pictured: Semyon Bychkov conducting the NY Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee.