Alan Gilbert to Lead NY Phil in Brahms's Symphony No. 3 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5; Facebook Live Broadcast 1/14

Music Director Alan Gilbert will lead the New York Philharmonic in Brahms's Symphony No. 3 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor, with Stephen Hough as soloist, Wednesday, January 11, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, January 12 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, January 13 at 8:00 p.m.; and Saturday, January 14 at 8:00 p.m. The January 14 performance will be broadcast on Facebook Live, the Philharmonic's second live concert broadcast on Facebook, following the 2016-17 season Opening Gala Concert. Hosted by WQXR's Terrance McKnight and directed by Habib Azar, the live, online broadcast - available at facebook.com/nyphilharmonic - will also feature live interviews with the evening's artists. The concert will be available for on-demand viewing on the Philharmonic's website, YouTube, and Facebook through August 31, 2017.

"I love Brahms's Third Symphony perhaps the most of all of Brahms's symphonies," said Alan Gilbert. "It is introspective and quite sad, and rich with an ambiguity in a way that makes it particularly special."

Beethoven's Emperor Concerto is among the season's performances of the complete Beethoven piano concerto cycle. In the 2015-16 season Stephen Hough performed Beethoven's complete piano concertos in Australia and Singapore. The Australian wrote of his 2015 performance of the Emperor Concerto with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra: "He stepped away from well-worn paths in this familiar work and brought to it a passion and vision that made it as if one was hearing it for the first time. Hough was transfixing in his muscle-flexing power, intensity and heightened color."

The Philharmonic produced its first Facebook Live concert broadcast on September 21, 2016, the Opening Gala Concert. The video reached more than 1.2 million people, received 150,000 views, and logged 25,000 engagements.

Related Events

• Philharmonic Free Fridays

The New York Philharmonic is offering 100 free tickets to young people ages 13-26 for the concert Friday, January 13 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 2016-17 season's 16 Friday evening subscription concerts.

• Facebook Live Broadcast

The January 14 performance will be broadcast on Facebook Live, available at facebook.com/nyphilharmonic, hosted by WQXR's Terrance McKnight, and directed by Habib Azar. The concert will be available for on-demand viewing on the Philharmonic's website, YouTube, and Facebook through August 31, 2017.

Artists
As Music Director of the New York Philharmonic since 2009, Alan Gilbert has introduced the positions of The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, and Artist-in-Association; CONTACT!, the new-music series; the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, an exploration of today's music; and the New York Philharmonic Global Academy, partnerships with cultural institutions to offer training of pre-professional musicians, often alongside performance residencies. The Financial Times called him "the imaginative maestro-impresario in residence."

Alan Gilbert concludes his final season as Music Director with four programs that reflect themes, works, and musicians that hold particular meaning for him, including Beethoven's Ninth Symphony alongside Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Wagner's complete Das Rheingold in concert, and an exploration of how music can effect positive change in the world. Other highlights include three World Premieres, Mahler's Fourth Symphony, Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, and Manhattan, performed live to film. He also leads the Orchestra on the EUROPE / SPRING 2017 tour and in performance residencies in Shanghai and Santa Barbara. Past highlights include acclaimed stagings of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, Janá?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson (2015 Emmy nomination), and Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake starring Marion Cotillard; 28 World Premieres; a tribute to Boulez and Stucky during the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL; The Nielsen Project; the Verdi Requiem and Bach's B-minor Mass; the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey, performed live to film; Mahler's Resurrection Symphony on the tenth anniversary of 9/11; performing violin in Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time; and ten tours around the world.

Conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and former principal guest conductor of Hamburg's NDR Symphony Orchestra, Alan Gilbert regularly conducts leading orchestras around the world. This season he returns to the foremost European orchestras, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Munich Philharmonic, Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw, and Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He will record Beethoven's complete piano concertos with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Inon Barnatan, and conduct Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, his first time leading a staged opera there. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting John Adams's Doctor Atomic in 2008, the DVD of which received a Grammy Award, and he conducted Messiaen's Des Canyons aux étoiles on a recent album recorded live at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Mr. Gilbert is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at The Juilliard School, where he holds the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies. His honors include Honorary Doctor of Music degrees from The Curtis Institute of Music (2010) and Westminster Choir College (2016), Columbia University's Ditson Conductor's Award (2011), election to The American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2014), a Foreign Policy Association Medal for his commitment to cultural diplomacy (2015), Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2015), and New York University's Lewis Rudin Award for Exemplary Service to New York City (2016).

Over the course of his career, Stephen Hough has distinguished himself as a true polymath, not only securing a reputation as an insightful pianist, but also as a writer and composer. In 2001 he was the first classical performing artist to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and in 2013 he was named a Commander of the British Empire. He regularly writes for The Guardian, The Times, Gramophone, and BBC Music Magazine, and recently completed his first novel, The Final Retreat. Over six years he wrote more than 600 articles for his The Telegraph blog, which became one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion. He has appeared with most of the major American and European orchestras and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the world. In addition to these New York Philharmonic performances, highlights of his 2016-17 U.S. season include appearances with the Atlanta, Oregon, Seattle, and St. Louis symphony orchestras; solo recitals in Miami, Santa Fe, and Rockville, Maryland, featuring his own Sonata III (Trinitas) alongside works by Franck, Liszt, and Schubert; and a performance of works by Debussy in St. Paul, Minnesota, on a program that also features two of Mr. Hough's original choral compositions. International appearances this season include the BBC Proms; solo recitals in Sweden, the U.K., and Mexico; and performances with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and City of Birmingham and São Paulo Symphony Orchestras. He has recorded more than 50 albums for Hyperion, most recently the Dvo?ák and Schumann Piano Concertos with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons. Stephen Hough made his New York Philharmonic debut in December 2003 performing Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5, led by Marcello Viotti; most recently, he performed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1, led by Lorin Maazel, in New York and Philadelphia in January 2005.

Repertoire
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) composed his final piano concerto, Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor (1809), while Vienna was under siege by Napoleon's armies, although the nickname "Emperor," appended after his death, refers not to Napoleon, but rather to the work's regal temperament. It was, however, written under war's duress: "What a destructive, unruly life around me! Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of all sorts!" he wrote, yet his despair is never manifested in the defiant, rebellious, and triumphant score. Even though this is the only one of his five piano concertos that Beethoven could not premiere himself, because of his by-then near-total deafness, it concluded one of his most vibrantly productive periods. He also introduced something new in this concerto: where soloists would normally expect to improvise and show off their technical abilities in a cadenza, he wrote in the score: "do not play a cadenza, but immediately begin the following," and notated an enhanced cadenza-like passage that continues to work in the thematic material and then proceeds to the end of the first movement. After the work's Leipzig premiere in 1811, a journalist proclaimed: "It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos." Conductor Henry C. Timm led pianist Gustave Satter in the Philharmonic's first performance of the Emperor Concerto in 1855 at Niblo's Garden. Pianist Yefim Bronfman most recently performed the work, conducted by Alan Gilbert, as part of the June 2014 The Beethoven Piano Concertos: A Philharmonic Festival, and they reprised it at that summer's Bravo! Vail residency in July 2014.

The premiere of Johannes Brahms's (1833-97) Symphony No. 3, conducted by Hans Richter with the Vienna Philharmonic on December 2, 1883, was one of the greatest triumphs of Brahms's career. Wagnerians - the acolytes of Brahms's chief musical rival - were on hand to hiss the performance, but their demonstration only reinforced the enthusiasm expressed by the majority of the audience. Compact yet dramatic - it is the shortest of his four symphonies - and composed six years after the previous one, Brahms's lifelong friend Clara Schumann wrote to him after hearing the piece: "What a work! What a poem! What a harmonious mood pervades the whole! ... I could not tell you which movement I loved most." Brahms, always full of self-doubt, was less sanguine: six weeks after the premiere he wrote to a friend that "the reputation [this symphony] has acquired makes me want to cancel all my engagements." The New York Philharmonic first performed Brahms's Symphony No. 3 in November 1884, led by Theodore Thomas; the Orchestra most recently performed it in November 2012, led by Kurt Masur.

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Major support for Philharmonic Free Fridays is provided by The Pratt Foundation.

Additional funding is provided by Jack and Susan Rudin.

Philharmonic Free Fridays is made possible, in part, by a donation from an anonymous donor through the New York Philharmonic's 2014 Share the Music! campaign.

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Citi. Preferred Card of the New York Philharmonic.

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Emirates is the Official Airline of the New York Philharmonic.

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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 $34. Tickets for Open Rehearsals are $20. 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 through the Internet for students within 10 days of the performance, 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.)

For press tickets, call Lanore Carr in the New York Philharmonic Communications Department at (212) 875-5714, or email her at carrl@nyphil.org.

New York Philharmonic

David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center

Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 7:30 p.m.
Open Rehearsal - 9:45 a.m.
Thursday, January 12, 2017, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, January 13, 2017, 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, January 14, 2017, 8:00 p.m.
Concert will be broadcast live on Facebook (facebook.com/nyphilharmonic)
On-demand on the Philharmonic's website (nyphil.org), YouTube (youtube.com/newyorkphilharmonic), and Facebook

Alan Gilbert, conductor
Stephen Hough, piano

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor
BRAHMS Symphony No. 3

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Photo Credit: Chris Lee

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