Violinist Karen Gomyo Joins NY Philharmonic's Annual, Free Memorial Day Concert, 5/25

Violinist Karen Gomyo will join the New York Philharmonic to perform Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending at the Orchestra’s 18th free, Annual Memorial Day Concert at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street, Monday, May 25, 2009, at 8:00 p.m. David Robertson will conduct. The program also features Ives’s The Unanswered Question, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Messiaen’s L’Ascension.

This will be the first time since 2001, when a six-alarm fire damaged the building, that the entire 601-foot-long sanctuary will be available for seating, following a $4.1 million cleaning and restoration. Seating is on a first-come, first-served served basis. Music will also be piped out onto the adjacent Pulpit Green, weather permitting.

American conductor David Robertson is acclaimed as a leading interpreter of both the standard classical repertoire as well as less traditional works of our time. Now in his fourth season as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO), he is also principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a post to which he was appointed in 2005.

In addition to his commitments in St. Louis, Mr. Robertson continues to appear as a guest conductor nationally and internationally throughout the 2008–09 season. Highlights include world premieres of works by composers such as Miroslav Srnka with The Ensemble Intercontemporain; Sam Hayden with the BBC Symphony; and Ivan Fedele with the FilarMonica Della Scala. In April 2009 he brought the SLSO to Carnegie Hall for two concerts, and also led the Juilliard Orchestra as part of the inaugural concert of the re-opening of Alice Tully Hall Opening Nights Festival. Additional guest appearances in the U.S. include performances with the Boston Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestras; and San Francisco and Seattle Symphonies. Internationally, he appears with the Edinburgh Festival, Teatro alla Scala, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Dresden Staatskapelle, Berlin Philharmonic, and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others.

David Robertson has made numerous recordings for the Sony Classical, Naive, EMI/Virgin Classics, Deutsche Grammophon, Atlantic/Erato, Nuema, Adès, Valois, and Naxos labels. His recordings feature works by composers such as John Adams, Pascal Dusapin, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Valentin Silvestrov, Bartók, Dvo?ák, Ginastera, Lalo, Milhaud, and Saint-Saëns.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Mr. Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. He is the recipient of Columbia University’s 2006 Ditson Conductor’s Award, and he and the SLSO received the ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming for the 2005–06 season from the American Symphony Orchestra League. Musical America named him Conductor of the Year for 2000. In 1997 David Robertson received the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the premier prize of its kind, given to exceptionally gifted American conductors. Mr. Robertson last conducted the New York Philharmonic in October 2008.

Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo, who received the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2008, first caught public attention just one week after her 15th birthday when she won the 1997 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She became the youngest musician ever to be presented in the Young Concert Artists Series, and made her New York critically acclaimed debut as the recipient of the Summis Auspiciis Prize. She has since appeared as soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician across the U.S., Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia.

Highlights of her 2008–09 season include re-engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, led by Leonard Slatkin; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under Gilbert Varga; Houston Symphony Orchestra under Louis Langrée; Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Kwamé Ryan; and first-time appearances with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Xian Zhang; and the RoyAl Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, New Jersey Symphony, and Orquesta Filarmonica de la Ciudad de Mexico, San Francisco Symphony, and Philadelphia Orchestra.

Karen Gomyo has a keen interest in modern tango music, has taken tango dance lessons, and joined a special residency program at Banff in the summer of 2005, studying and exercising improvisation on the violin. In this field she has collaborated with artists such as Piazzolla’s pianist Pablo Ziegler, bandeonist Raul Jaurena, and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera.

Born in Tokyo to a Japanese painter and French professor of philosophy, Karen Gomyo was raised in Montreal. At age five she had already begun performing in public. She was one of 10 children chosen to play in a master class in Chicago given by the late Dorothy DeLay, and was promptly taken under the pedagogue’s wing to study on full scholarship at The Juilliard School. Ms. Gomyo continued her studies with Mauricio Fuks at Indiana University, and with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she graduated in May 2007 with an Artist Diploma. Ms. Gomyo last appeared with the New York Philharmonic in its Concerts in the Parks in July 2005, performing Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole conducted by Xian Zhang.

One of American composer Charles Ives’s most intriguing and imaginative works, The Unanswered Question, presents a vivid philosophical vision in sound. A solo trumpet repeatedly intones an enigmatic musical query, to which a group of winds can only offer glib and unsatisfying responses, while the strings evoke the indifferent passage of time. True to his reputation as an experimentalist, Ives divides the orchestra into two entities that play independently of one another. He wrote The Unanswered Question in 1906, making slight revisions in the mid 1930s. The New York Philharmonic first performed the work on tour in Russia in August 1959 led by Leonard Bernstein, and most recently, in December 2002, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi.

Samuel Barber, although not known as an innovator, nevertheless produced music with a very personal stamp, winning many awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and three Guggenheim fellowships. “I write what I feel,” he said near the end of his life. “I’m not a self-conscious composer ... it is said I have no style at all but that doesn’t matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.” Barber adapted the intensely moving, elegiac Adagio for Strings from the slow movement of his String Quartet, which he originally composed in 1936. The Adagio for Strings was premiered in a radio broadcast by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938. It was first performed by the New York Philharmonic in January 1940 under Sir John Barbirolli, and most recently, in July 2006 led by Bramwell Tovey.

Inspired by a poem of the same name by British author George Meredith, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, composed for violin and orchestra, has proven to be one of its composer’s most enduring and popular works. Originally composed in 1914 but not performed with orchestra until 1921, the piece evokes the flight of a skylark over the bucolic English countryside, with the violin soloist soaring in and over the orchestra through two pastoral folk melodies. The New York Philharmonic has programmed The Lark Ascending only once before, in June 1965, with Ruggiero Ricci as violin soloist, conducted by Sir Malcom Sargent.

French composer Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension was composed in 1932–33, one of the composer’s earliest orchestral works, and was subsequently arranged for organ, the composer’s own instrument. The composition is divided into four movements, each one a mystical meditation on Jesus’s departure from earth, as commemorated in the Christian feast of the Ascension. Musically, the movements allude to the forms and styles of traditional sacred music, such as plainchant and chorale, but through the prism of Messiaen’s very personal musical vocabulary. L’Ascension was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski in November 1947; the most recent performance was in November 1997, led by Myung-Whun Chung.

This concert is made possible through the generous support of the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Credit Suisse is the Global Sponsor of the New York Philharmonic.

Programs of the New York Philharmonic are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Admission to this performance is free.

New York Philharmonic Annual Free Memorial Day Concert The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street Monday, May 25, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

Photo taken from http://www.cbso.co.uk/gallery/albums/Soloists2007-2008/Karen_Gomyo_credit_Christian_Steiner.jpg.

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