Symphony Orchestra, led by its new Music Director Marin Alsop, will perform two concerts of a program it will later take to New York's Carnegie Hall (Feb. 9), an event marking the Orchestra's first Carnegie Hall appearance under the baton of Maestra Alsop.
The program includes Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Debussy's Prélude à lʹaprès‐midi dʹun faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1919), and the U.S. premiere of American composer Steven Mackey's Time Release, with Scottish solo percussionist Colin Currie.
In addition to these performances, on Wednesday, February 6, composer Steven Mackey will participate in the BSO's "Composers in Conversation," a new lecture series offering patrons a unique opportunity to engage with 11 of the contemporary composers featured in the 2007‐2008 season. See below for complete program information.
Ms. Alsop's first months at the helm of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra have been hailed as a great success by audiences and critics alike. The New York Times wrote, "With her kinetic conducting style and affinity for jazzy contemporary music, Ms. Alsop brings rhythmic verve to everything she performs." Referring to her embrace of contemporary music, the Baltimore Sun wrote, "Marin Alsop, in her inaugural season at the helm of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is determined to perk up ears with concerts that are as much about new musical experiences as shedding fresh light on familiar ones."
For the orchestra's Baltimore and Carnegie Hall programs, Ms. Alsop conducts three late Romantic‐era works each based on a character from folklore: Strauss's gleeful tone‐poem based on the 14th‐century German rogue Till Eulenspiegel; Debussy's breakthrough musical paraphrase of Mallarmé's Symbolist poem on the faun from Greek mythology; and Stravinsky's suite from his ballet The Firebird, the creature of the Russian imagination.
Paired with these works is Steven Mackey's Time Release, a concerto for percussion and orchestra written for the percussionist Colin Currie, which has its U.S. premiere in Baltimore on February 7. Unlike the three folkloric works, the new work is not programmatic in nature, but the composer relates that it tells a particular story about the marimba, the score's primary percussion instrument. "The evolution of the marimba as a mature melodic voice is a thread through Time Release," Mr. Mackey says. "The marimba ornaments and embellishes the material of the orchestra in the first movement. It takes a more thematic role in the first part of the second movement with agile riffs and runs that are more rhetorical than melodic. Midway into the second movement, the marimba introduces a jaunty tune, and the third movement is all about melody. It is a melody with wide leaps and angular contours, yet with an ambling, folk‐music character suited to the marimba's cultural heritage." In addition to the marimba, Mr. Currie plays several other percussion instruments in Time Release: almglocken, cowbells, Peking opera gong, cymbals, kick drum, samba whistle, flexatone, vibraslap, and crotales.
Carnegie Hall recently announced that Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will next return in October 2008, as part of its Leonard Bernstein festival, The Best of All Possible Worlds. Ms. Alsop, a protégée of the famed conductor/composer, will conduct the orchestra in two performances of Bernstein's Mass, the first at Carnegie Hall and the second featuring hundreds of New York City schoolchildren at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights as part of The Bernstein Mass Project, presented by Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute. -- www.baltimoresymphony.org
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