April 14, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE OREGON SYMPHONY IN MAY:
THE SEASON ENDS WITH A BANG (AND ANOTHER, AND ANOTHER)

---

(PORTLAND, Ore.) –Nine months after it began with an al fresco performance in front of a huge crowd on Portland’s waterfront, the Oregon Symphony’s 2009/10 concert season comes to an equally thrilling conclusion in May with Music Director Carlos Kalmar on the podium for three dramatic weekends of Classical music in a row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. First up: a perennial audience favorite, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. Then comes a three-night festival at which all five of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concertos, plus his Triple Concerto, will be performed at three completely different concerts on consecutive days. Finally – just as the audience may begin to wonder what Kalmar can do to top that – he brings down the curtain with Gustav Mahler’s monumental “Titan” Symphony. Complete details follow:

SATURDAY-MONDAY, MAY 8-10:
CELLIST QUIRINE VIERSEN MAKES HER U.S. DEBUT IN DVOŘÁK CONCERTO

• When and Where: Three performances, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, May   8 and 9, and 8 p.m. Monday, May 10; Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

• The Performers: The Oregon Symphony, with Music Director Carlos Kalmar on the podium, joined by cello soloist Quirine Viersen.

• The Program:
• Samuel Barber: Music for a Scene from Shelley
• Antonin Dvořák: Cello Concerto
• Aaron Jay Kernis: Newly Drawn Sky
• Leonard Bernstein: Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

• Tickets: $15 to $100; at the Oregon Symphony Ticket Office, 923 SW Washington St., in downtown Portland. Ticket office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Tickets may also be purchased by phone at (503) 228-1353 or (800) 228-7343 during the same hours, at the concert hall box office starting two hours before the performance, or online at any time from the orchestra’s web site, OrSymphony.org.  

• What’s So Special About These Concerts:
• Centerpiece of the program is one of music’s perennial crowd-pleasers, the Cello Concerto of Antonin Dvořák – the most-performed and most-recorded composition of its kind, an orchestral “war horse” in the best sense. Since receiving its Oregon Symphony premiere in 1956, Portland audiences have had the thrill of hearing it performed live many times by soloists who were – or were destined to become – the leading cellists of their time. Among them: Leonard Rose (in 1956 and again in 1975), Janos Starker (1962), Lynn Harrell (1980 and 2001), Yo-Yo Ma (1995), Mstislav Rostropovich (1998) and Daniel Müller-Schott (2005).   
• Performing the Dvořák this time will be a soloist new to Portland audiences – Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen – who is quickly earning a reputation as one of Europe’s rising stars. She makes her American orchestral debut at these concerts.
• Among the concerto’s admirers was Johannes Brahms, who mused from his deathbed: “Why on earth didn’t I know one could write a cello concerto like this? If I’d only known, I’d have written one long ago.” Ironically, one of the few who seemed not to love it was Dvořák himself; he once told a student: “I have … written a cello concerto, but I am sorry to this day I did so, and I never intend to write another.”
• Also on the program, Leonard Bernstein’s gritty symphonic suite for the film On the Waterfront, as well as two short works receiving their Oregon Symphony premieres: Samuel Barber’s 1933 Music for a Scene from Shelley and 2005’s Newly Drawn Sky by one of the hottest American composers of the moment, Aaron Jay Kernis.
• Kalmar, who conducts, is something of an expert on the music of Kernis in general and Newly Drawn Sky in particular. Symphony in Waves, his 2008 Cedille Records CD (with the Grant Park Orchestra), features the premiere recording of Newly Drawn Sky alongside other Kernis works.

 

SATURDAY-MONDAY, MAY 15-17:
THREE-NIGHT BEETHOVEN FESTIVAL SURVEYS ALL FIVE PIANO CONCERTOS

• When and Where: Three performances, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, May   15 and 16, and 8 p.m. Monday, May 17; Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

• The Performers: The Oregon Symphony, with Music Director Carlos Kalmar on the podium, joined by pianist Arnaldo Cohen, who performs as soloist in all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos over three nights. At the first of the concerts, they’re also joined by violinist Jun Iwasaki and cellist Quirine Viersen in a performance of the Beethoven Triple Concerto.

• The Program:
  
  
• Saturday, May. 15 (7:30 p.m.):

·   Leonore Overture No. 3
·   Piano Concerto No. 2
·   Triple Concerto for violin, cello and piano

• Sunday, May 16 (7:30 p.m.):

·   Leonore Overture No. 1
·   Piano Concerto No. 1
·   Piano Concerto No. 4

• Monday, May 17 (8 p.m.):

·   Leonore Overture No. 2
·   Piano Concerto No. 3
·   Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

• Tickets: $15 to $100 is the price range for single tickets to each individual concert. Discounted subscription packages for the entire three-concert festival start at $42. Tickets are available at the Oregon Symphony Ticket Office, 923 SW Washington St., in downtown Portland. Ticket office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Tickets may also be purchased by phone at (503) 228-1353 or (800) 228-7343 during the same hours, at the concert hall box office starting two hours before the performance, or online at any time from the orchestra’s web site, OrSymphony.org.  

• What’s So Special About These Concerts:
• The festival presents a rare treat for the many listeners who revere the phenomenal piano music of Ludwig van Beethoven: an opportunity to hear all five of his compositions for solo piano and orchestra, performed back-to-back by the same pianist.
• Beethoven composed his five piano concertos over a quarter-century span starting in 1785, when he was 15 years old. The festival reaches its climax Monday night with a performance of what many consider to be the greatest piano concerto ever written: No. 5, better known as the “Emperor” concerto.
• The pianist who agreed to take the Oregon Symphony up on the formidable challenge is Brazilian-born Arnaldo Cohen, who is sometimes described as “the best pianist audiences have never heard of.”
• Cohen, who is on the faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington, has performed with the Oregon Symphony once before, in February 2008, when he won wide critical and audience acclaim for his performance of Franz Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto. The Oregonian praised him then as “a titanic talent with gorgeous tone and phenomenal technique.”
• One oddity that sets Cohen apart from most of the world’s other great concert pianists: He didn’t start studying the piano seriously until age 19, after deciding suddenly one day that the other things he was studying at the time – engineering and violin – were not what he wanted to do the rest of his life.
• In addition to the major piano works, each concert opens with one of the three Leonore Overtures that Beethoven wrote between 1805 and 1807 for his only opera. Another quirk: The most popular of those by far – Leonore Overture No. 3, which the audience will hear Saturday night – was first performed by Oregon Symphony nearly a century ago, in 1911, but versions No. 1 and No. 2 will receive their Oregon Symphony premieres at these concerts.
• Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen, in Portland to perform the Dvořák Cello Concerto with the Oregon Symphony in her American orchestral debut the weekend before, stays on as one of the soloists in the Beethoven Triple Concerto at the festival’s first concert Saturday night. The orchestra’s concertmaster, Jun Iwasaki, is the violin soloist.
• Please note that the concerts start at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday but 8 p.m. on Monday.
• The presenting sponsor of the Beethoven Festival concerts is Wells Fargo.

 

SATURDAY-MONDAY, MAY 22-24:
THE SYMPHONY SEASON GETS A ROUSING FINISH WITH MAHLER’S “TITAN”

• When and Where: Three performances, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, May 22 and 23, and 8 p.m. Monday, May 24; Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. (NOTE: This concert will also be performed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 25, at Willamette University’s Smith Hall in Salem.)

• The Performers: The Oregon Symphony, with Music Director Carlos Kalmar on the podium, joined by violinist Elina Vähälä as soloist in the Britten Violin Concerto.

• The Program:
• Magnus Lindberg: Purcell Variation
• Benjamin Britten: Violin Concerto
• Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1, “The Titan”

• Tickets: FOR THE PORTLAND PERFORMANCES: $15 to $100; at the Oregon Symphony Ticket Office, 923 SW Washington St., in downtown Portland. Ticket office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Tickets may also be purchased by phone at (503) 228-1353 or (800) 228-7343 during the same hours, at the concert hall box office starting two hours before the performance, or online at any time from the orchestra’s web site, OrSymphony.org.  

FOR THE SALEM PERFORMANCE: $25 to $43, available from TicketsWest.

• What’s So Special About These Concerts:
• The Oregon Symphony’s 2009/10 concert season comes to a proverbial big finish with the orchestra’s first performance in a decade of Gustav Mahler’s hour-long Symphony No. 1, commonly known as “The Titan.”
• The Mahler First is one of those pieces that always thrill fans of big orchestral masterworks, with its heroic themes and its finale of sturm und drang in the form of pounding brass and timpani.
• Mahler called it “the most spontaneous and daringly composed of my works” and was surprised and disappointed when audiences and critics reacted negatively upon first hearing it. After its 1889 Budapest premiere, the composer said: “My friends avoided me afterwards. … I went around like a leper and an outlaw.”
• With the Mahler First, Kalmar continues his informal tradition of presenting one of the monumental Mahler symphonies each season. (Last season he presented Mahler’s Fourth; the Mahler Tenth is on the orchestra’s 2010/11 concert calendar.)
• The first half of the program has a decidedly Finnish ambience and features two works being performed by the Oregon Symphony for the first time ever: contemporary Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg’s short Purcell Variation and English composer Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto (with Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä as soloist).
• The presenting sponsor of these concerts is The Nines Hotel.

###

CONTACT:
Carl Herko
Vice President, Media & Public Relations
(503) 416-6347
cherko@orsymphony.org