The Orchestra Now Announces 2022-23 Season

The Orchestra Now, the visionary orchestra and master's degree program founded by Bard College president, conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, returns to the stage for its eighth season on September 10, 2022.

Four different series and three free concerts will offer 16 programs and 25 performances presenting creative combinations of both well-known and less familiar repertoire through May 21, 2023.

The Orchestra welcomes 37 new members this season, for a total of 62 musicians from 13 countries. Since it launched in 2015, TŌN has performed 576 works by 275 composers in 36 venues for more than 76,000 live and virtual concertgoers, with 298 soloists and 26 conductors.

"I'm eager to begin the Orchestra's eighth exciting season," said Music Director Leon Botstein. "We have a year full of innovative programming that offers both traditional and rarely-heard works, and a roster of guest artists that features world-renowned musicians alongside emerging new talent. All of this will be performed by an ensemble of gifted young musicians from around the world in a number of venues and thematic series that underscore the ongoing success of the TŌN program," said Music Director Leon Botstein.

The Carnegie Hall series includes a program focusing on rarely-performed works by German and Austrian composers from The Lost Generation and another surveying Eastern European music written Before and After Soviet Communism. Two Rose Theater concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center feature guest conductors Tan Dun, dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and JoAnn Falletta leading a program including Boston Philharmonic Orchestra concertmaster Nikki Chou in Ravel's Tzigane. The popular Sight & Sound series at The Metropolitan Museum of Art returns with three programs investigating the links between fine arts and music through a focus on Niels Gade & The Danish Golden Age, Vaughan Williams & Renaissance England, and Haydn, Brahms & Classical Ideals. And the Fisher Center series at Bard College offers 15 performances of eight different programs including special presentations of Beethoven's Missa solemnis and Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe. Three free concerts are led by conductors Zachary Schwartzman and Andres Rivas in Manhattan and Great Barrington, MA.

This year marks the sixth season of TŌN's successful broadcast series on WMHT-FM, the classical music radio station of New York's Capital Region, and the fifth season on WWFM, the Classical Network station serving New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, both featuring programs from the Orchestra's Fisher Center series. TŌN's performances are also heard regularly on American Public Media's Performance Today.

TŌN's new album, titled Classics of American Romantism, features George Frederick Bristow's Symphony No. 4 "Arcadian" and William Henry Fry's Niagara Symphony, and will be released on Bridge Records on September 16.

Carnegie Hall SERIES, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage

The Lost Generation

Thursday, November 3, 2022, at 7 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Adolf Busch (arr. P. Serkin): Variations on an Original Theme
Walter Braunfels: Sinfonia brevis
Hans Erich Apostel: Variations on a Theme by Haydn
Hugo Kauder: Symphony No. 1 (U.S. Premiere)
Conductor and Music Director Leon Botstein highlights four German and Austrian composers of the early 20th century whose music was unfairly ignored or suppressed during and following World War II. The evening opens with Adolph Busch's Variations on an Original Theme, performed in an orchestration by his grandson, the late Peter Serkin, who was on the piano faculty at Bard. Busch's original work, for piano four-hands, was composed in 1944 as a gift to his wife. The work was a favorite of Peter's and his father Rudolf Serkin, which they enjoyed playing together. Peter, later in his life, began investigating the music written by his grandfather and was attracted by the potential of the variations in an orchestral version, an idea that interested Leon Botstein. Peter Serkin worked on the project shortly before he passed away in 2020.

The program continues with Walter Braunfels' Sinfonia brevis. A Frankfurt native, Braunfels was director of the Cologne Academy of Music from 1945 to 1950 but was removed during the rise of Nazi power for being half-Jewish and composing what the regime considered degenerate music. Leon Botstein then leads Hans Apostel's version of Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Apostel was a modernist and student of Schoenberg. TŌN is partnering with the Hugo Kauder Society to debut a new restoration of the Viennese composer's First Symphony. A self-taught composer, Kauder left Vienna when the Nazis took over Austria, and ended up in the U.S., where he made his living writing music and teaching music theory, composition, and violin in New York City until his death in 1972.

Before and After Soviet Communism

Thursday, May 4, 2023, at 7 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Karol Szymanowski: Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin
György Kurtág: ...concertante...
Boris Tishchenko: Symphony No. 5
Leon Botstein unearths more seldom-heard masterpieces in this concert examining Eastern European music through the rise and fall of Soviet communism. Szymanowski's 1918 Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin was written during a time when the composer's interests turned towards exoticism. A song cycle for voice and piano, it is based on texts from the Polish poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and evokes the improvisational cry of the men who call Muslims to prayer. Russian composer Boris Tishchenko's Fifth Symphony is dedicated to Shostakovich in response to the death of his teacher, colleague, and friend. Hungarian composer György Kurtág's early-21st-century ...concertante.... consists of a single movement and a coda scored for large orchestra and two string soloists with a wide range of tonal color. Premiered in 2003 by the Danish National Symphony Radio Orchestra, the work won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

Tickets priced at $25-$50 will be available online at carnegiehall.org, by calling CarnegieCharge at 212.247.7800, or at the Carnegie Hall box office at 57th & Seventh Avenue. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue's health and safety requirements, which can be found here.
ROSE THEATER
The Orchestra Now returns to the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall for the sixth season with two concerts led respectively by JoAnn Falletta and Tan Dun.

JoAnn Falletta Conducts Ravel & More

Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 3 PM
JoAnn Falletta, conductor
Nikki Chooi, violin
Roberto Sierra: Fandangos
Ernest Chausson: Poème
Maurice Ravel: Tzigane
Albert Roussel: Bacchus and Ariane Suite No. 2
Paul Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber
The Orchestra Now welcomes back acclaimed conductor JoAnn Falletta, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), for her fourth appearance with TŌN. She is joined by violinist Nikki Chooi, concertmaster of the BPO, for Ravel's rhapsodic Tzigane and Chausson's mournful Poème.

Tan Dun Conducts

Sunday, May 21, 2023 at 3 PM
Tan Dun, conductor
Program to be announced
Grammy and Academy Award-winning composer and conductor Tan Dun returns to Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater to once again lead The Orchestra Now in an afternoon of music.

Tickets priced at $25-$50 will be available online at jazz.org, by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500, or at the Jazz at Lincoln Center box office at Broadway & 60th, Ground Floor. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue's health and safety requirements, which can be found here.

SIGHT & SOUND SERIES AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

Conductor and music historian Leon Botstein surveys the parallels between orchestral music and the visual arts with three concerts in TŌN's popular Sight & Sound series at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This season explores the connections between the Tudor era and a Vaughan Williams score to a documentary about Elizabethan England, as well as the influences of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and the Danish Golden Age on musical composition. In each program, a discussion is complemented by on-screen artworks and musical excerpts performed by the Orchestra, followed by a full performance and audience Q&A.

Vaughan Williams & Renaissance England

Sunday, December 4, 2022 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Vaughan Williams: Three Portraits from The England of Elizabeth
Artwork from the exhibition The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England
England under the volatile Tudor dynasty was a thriving home for the arts. An international community of artists and merchants navigated the high-stakes demands of royal patrons, including England's first two reigning queens. A 1955 documentary about Elizabethan England featured a score by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. These portraits from that score, adapted by Muir Mathieson, focus on three major figures of the Tudor era: Sir Francis Drake, William Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth I.

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 10, 2022-January 8, 2023.

Haydn, Brahms & The Manufactured Classical Ideal

Sunday, February 19, 2023 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 38, Prague
Johannes Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Haydn
Artwork from the exhibition Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color
When 18th-century scholars exhumed ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that had spent more than a millennium underground, they assumed that the pieces had been created without color. Based on their observations of those newfound objects, art scholars built an imaginary picture of the classical past; with it came a set, "classical" idea of musical structure and form, cemented by its originator, "Papa" Franz Josef Haydn. A century later, as late romanticism jettisoned fixed forms for passionate expressionism, Johannes Brahms fought to retain classicism as the aesthetic standard-and though musical classicism eventually ran its course, Brahms's Variations provide a unique look back to its origins.

Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 26, 2023.

Art & Music in Ninetheenth-Century Denmark

Sunday, April 16, 2023 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Niels Gade: Symphony No. 1, On Sjøland's Fair Plains
Artwork from the exhibition Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art
The Danish Golden Age, from 1816 until the late 1840s, was the period when Denmark emerged from its imperial traditions as a modern constitutional democracy. In art, the Golden Age was marked by a focus on the ideal Danish landscape and its northern light. In music, celebrated Danish composer Niels Gade was just beginning his career. His 1842 Symphony No. 1, On Sjøland's Fair Plains, which incorporates themes from several Danish folk songs, caught the attention of Felix Mendelssohn, sparking a close friendship and kinship between the two giants.

Beyond the Light: Identy and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art January 26-April 16, 2023.

Tickets priced at $30, $40, and $50; 3-Concert Series Save up to 20% at $75, $99 and $120. All tickets include same-day museum admission. Tickets may be purchased online here, by calling The Met at 212.570.3949, or at The Great Hall box office at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue's health and safety requirements, which can be found here.

THE FISHER CENTER SERIES AT BARD, Sosnoff Theater

The Orchestra Now, Bard's orchestral masters, presents its eighth season of concerts at the Fisher Center at Bard. Highlights include Beethoven's Missa solemnis, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Joan Tower's Concerto for Flute, symphonies by Mahler & Dvořák, and two Carnegie Hall previews featuring rarely-heard works by often overlooked composers. All programs will be livestreamed on The Orchestra Now's website, ton.bard.edu.

Joan Tower & Mahler's 5th

Saturday, September 10, 2022 at 7 PM
Sunday, September 11, 2022 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Samantha Martin, soprano
Andrea Ábel, flute
George Walker: Lilacs
Joan Tower: Concerto for Flute
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 5
TŌN begins its eighth season at Bard with Mahler's heroic Fifth Symphony, plus two works featuring winners of the Bard College Conservatory Concerto Competition: George Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lilacs, and the virtuosic flute concerto of Joan Tower, who has taught composition at Bard for 50 years.

Dvořák's 7th & The Czech Symphonic Tradition

Saturday, October 1, 2022 at 7 PM
Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Josef Suk: Scherzo fantastique
Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 7
Bohuslav Martinů: The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca
Leoš Janáček: Sinfonietta
TŌN spotlights four Czech composers whose music exemplifies that country's great symphonic legacy. The program includes Dvořák's monumentally powerful Seventh Symphony and Janáček's patriotic, brass-filled Sinfonietta.

Carnegie Hall Preview: The Lost Generation

This program will be performed at Carnegie Hall on November 3. Please see details above.
Saturday, October 29, 2022 at 7 PM
Sunday, October 30, 2022 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor

Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique

Saturday, February 11, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, February 12, 2023 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Evren Ozel, piano
Carl Maria von Weber: Der Freischütz Overture
Adolf von Henselt: Piano Concerto
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now kick off the spring 2023 season with an ultra-Romantic concert featuring Berlioz's epic tale of an artist's passion for a beautiful woman, Symphonie fantastique, and Henselt's remarkably beautiful Piano Concerto, which was debuted by Clara Schumann in 1844.

Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe

Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 3 PM
James Bagwell, conductor
Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program soloists
Gilbert & Sullivan: Iolanthe
TŌN Associate Conductor James Bagwell leads soloists from the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program in a concert performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's fairyland fantasy, which The New York Times called "a madcap Victorian fairytale, rife with merriment!"

Beethoven's Missa solemnis

Saturday, April 1, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, April 2, 2023 at 3 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Bard Festival Chorale
James Bagwell, choral director
Ludwig van Beethoven: Missa solemnis
Leon Botstein leads The Orchestra Now and the Bard Festival Chorale in a performance of one of only three sacred works Beethoven ever wrote, the Missa solemnis.

Naomi Woo Conducts Ravel

Saturday, April 8, 2023 at 7 PM
Naomi Woo, conductor
Stella Chen, violin
Béla Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 2
Maurice Ravel: Mother Goose Suite
Maurice Ravel: La Valse
Canadian conductor Naomi Woo, the Assistant Conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra was named one of the "Top 30 Classical Musicians under 30" by the CBC in 2019. Her program includes a Bartók violin concerto with Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award winner Stella Chen, and beloved works by Ravel.

Carnegie Hall Preview: Before and After Soviet Communism

This program will be performed at Carnegie Hall on May 4. Please see details above.
Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, April 30 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor

Tickets $25-$40; 5-concert subscription at 35% off. Choose your own subscription (mix and match 3 or more from all 8 concerts) at 25% off. All available online at fishercenter.bard.edu, or by calling the Fisher Center at 845.758.7900. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue's health and safety requirements, which can be found here.

TŌN continues its series of free concerts with three performances at venues in New York City and beyond, providing families with an opportunity to attend their first orchestral performance and introduce a new generation to classical music.

Shostakovich & Ives

Sunday, November 20, 2022, at 3 PM
Daniel Arts Center at Bard College at Simon's Rock
Andres Rivas, conductor
Aram Khachaturian: Greeting Overture
Fiodor Yakimenko: Lyric Poem dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov
Charles Edward Ives: Overture and March "1776"
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9
TŌN Assistant Conductor Andrés Rivas leads the Orchestra at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, MA. The program includes Ukrainian composer Fiodor Yakimenko's Lyric Poem, as well as Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony and Ives' overture to his never-written opera "1776."

Schumann, Strauss & Sibelius

Sunday, December 11, 2022, at 4 PM
Peter Norton Symphony Space
Zachary Schwartzman, conductor
Robert Schumann: Genoveva Overture
Richard Strauss: Four Symphonic Interludes from Intermezzo
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2
TŌN Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman returns with the orchestra to Symphony Space for another popular free concert. The program comprises Schumann's overture to the opera Genoveva, four symphonic interludes from Strauss' opera Intermezzo, and Sibelius' Second Symphony.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Sunday, May 14, 2023, at 4 PM
Peter Norton Symphony Space
Zachary Schwartzman, conductor
Katherine Lerner Lee, soprano, Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program
Paul Dukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Olivier Messiaen: Poèmes pour Mi
Henri Dutilleux: Symphony No. 1
TŌN wraps up its eighth season of free concerts with a performance at Symphony Space led by Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman. The program includes Messiaen's sentimental and spiritual song cycle Poèmes pour Mi, and Dukas' ever-popular symphonic poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Tickets: These concerts are FREE, no tickets necessary, advance RSVP suggested Check ton.bard.edu for RSVP information. Concertgoers will need to comply with health and safety requirements for both venues.

To post a comment, you must register and login.