Maestra Marin Alsop Leads Baltimore Symphony

The Baltimore Symphony's incoming Music Director Marin Alsop seems to have a magnetic pull for provocative and uniquely collaborative projects. Her longtime rapport with many of today's most established composers combined with her flair for tackling contemporary repertoire make her a leading candidate to conduct bold, complex new works.

In addition to her responsibilities as a high-profile conductor of leading orchestras worldwide, for 15 years Maestra Alsop has served as the Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, a summer festival that is a veritable incubator of contemporary, groundbreaking new music.

Last summer at the Cabrillo Festival, Ms. Alsop once again reached beyond the norm, leading the world premiere of Frans Lanting's LIFE: A Journey Through Time, a multimedia work that merges art, science, photography and music to present a lyrical interpretation of the evolution of life on Earth. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, February 23-25 at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop perform the East Coast premiere of this pioneering collaboration. PLEASE NOTE: This program will open at the Music Center at Strathmore on Thursday, February 22, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. See below for complete program information.

Featuring "lushly pulsing" music by composer and Baltimore native Philip Glass, orchestrated by Michael Riesman, Frans Lanting's LIFE: A Journey Through Time was produced by the Cabrillo Festival in collaboration with Mr. Lanting, a National Geographic photographer, author, and conservationist, who is hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. Award-winning video editor and designer Alexander Nichols choreographed Mr. Lanting's still photographs to Glass's score to create this captivating hour-long production. The result is a multimedia presentation unlike any other, which traces the evolution of the planet through Mr. Lanting's stunning photographs of the living world, projected on a 48-foot by 13-foot screen suspended above the orchestra.

Six years in development, LIFE: A Journey Through Time is Frans Lanting's most ambitious project to date. In the year 2000, he set off on a journey of photographic discovery that parallels new scientific insights about the story of life on Earth. His search has been wide-ranging and provocative, leading him from microscopic worlds to primordial landscapes that preserve time capsules of life's history. The result is a glorious celebration of planet Earth that inspires and informs through images and stories of the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. From prehistoric trilobites to giant tortoises, delicate jellies to spiny octopus trees, and from steaming jungles to shimmering coral reefs, LIFE: A Journey Through Time is a testament to the magical beauty and enduring miracle of our living planet.

Other elements of LIFE: A Journey Through Time, co-produced by Frans Lanting and Christine Eckstrom, his wife and partner, include a large-format photographic book published by Taschen in September 2006, an internationally touring photographic exhibition, and an original website production, www.LifeThroughTime.com, that launched in September 2006. The LIFE: A Journey Through Time books, published by Taschen, will be available for purchase at these concerts.

Also included on this incredible concert program is Philip Glass's Concerto for Saxophone Quartet, featuring the welcome return of The Capitol Quartet. One of the composer's most widely performed classical works, the Concerto for Saxophone Quartet consists of four movements, each featuring a different member of the quartet. The last movement emphasizes the group as a whole, creating an ensemble effect similar to a Baroque concerto grosso. The concerto is characteristic of Mr. Glass's famous technique of gradually layering on new elements to the individual lines and rhythms, and eventually gives way to a lively contrapuntal banter between saxophone and orchestra.

Marin Alsop, Music Director

Marin Alsop recently made history with her appointment as twelfth music director of the Baltimore Symphony beginning with the 2007-08 season. She will be the first woman to head a major American orchestra, which mirrors her ongoing success in the United Kingdom as principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony since 2002. In summer 2005, she was named a 2005 MacArthur Fellow, the first conductor ever to receive this most prestigious American award. The first artist to win Gramophone's "Artist of the Year" award and the Royal Philharmonic Society's Conductor's Award in the same season (2003), Ms. Alsop recently won the Classical Brit Award for Best Female Artist of 2005.

Maestra Alsop is a regular guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also appears frequently as a guest conductor with many distinguished orchestras worldwide. After a highly successful 12-year tenure as music director of the Colorado Symphony, Ms. Alsop continues her association as conductor laureate; she also continues as music director of the highly acclaimed Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California.
Ms. Alsop is a native of New York City; she attended Yale University and received her Master's degree from The Juilliard School. In 1989, her conducting career was launched when she was a prizewinner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition in New York, and in the same year, she was awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa and Gustav Meier.

Frans Lanting, photographer

Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. His influential work appears in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. For more than two decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder about our living planet. Mr. Lanting has received top honors from World Press Photo, the title of BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in London and is a recipient of Sweden's Lennart Nilsson Award.

Prince Bernhard inducted him as a Knight in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, the Netherlands' highest conservation honor. Mr. Lanting makes his home in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife Christine Eckstrom, an editor, producer, and former staff writer at National Geographic with whom he collaborates on fieldwork and publishing projects. Ms. Eckstrom is the co-producer of LIFE: A Journey Through Time.

Philip Glass, composer

Philip Glass is considered one of the most influential composers of our time. He is a pioneer of Minimalist music and is widely recognized as a composer who has brought art music to the public. He has produced music for film, opera, theatre, and orchestra, and has received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his film scores. A prolific composer, Mr. Glass's artistic collaborators include Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, the late Allen Ginsberg, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He is a Buddhist and a co-founder of the Tibet House with actor Richard Gere. A native of Baltimore, Mr. Glass makes his home in New York City. -- www.baltimoresymphony.org