ALSOP CONDUCTS GERSHWIN AND BERNSTEIN
The Philadelphia Orchestra Conrad Tao, pianoThe Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Designate Marin Alsop returns to Bravo! Vail leading the Orchestra in Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from his iconic West Side Story, in addition to Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and Piano Concerto in F Major featuring critically acclaimed pianist Conrad Tao.
Did you know?
This all-American program promises plenty of energy thanks to the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein’s West Side Story and two works by Gershwin: his Cuban Overture, featuring a passel of Cuban percussion instruments, and his jazz-infused Piano Concerto in F major.
Featured Artists
Marin Alsop
Conrad Tao
Marin Alsop
conductor
One of the foremost conductors of our time, Marin Alsop represents a powerful and inspiring voice. Convinced that music has the power to change lives, she is internationally recognized for her innovative approach to programming and audience development, deep commitment to education, and championing of music’s importance in the world. The first woman to serve as the head of a major orchestra in the United States, South America, Austria and Britain, she is, as the New York Times put it, not only “a formidable musician and a powerful communicator” but also “a conductor with a vision.”
The 2023-24 season marks Alsop’s fifth as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which she leads at Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus, as well as on recordings, broadcasts, and international tours; her first as artistic director & chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony; and her first as principal guest conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. In fall 2024, she begins an additional three-season term as principal guest conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Meanwhile she also holds positions as chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival, where she curates and conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual summer residency, and as the first music director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) at the University of Maryland, where she launched a new academy for young conductors and leads the NOI+F Philharmonic each June.
A full decade after becoming the first female conductor of London’s Last Night of the Proms, Alsop makes history again in September 2023, as both the first woman and the first American to guest conduct three Last Nights in the festival’s 128-year history. In spring 2024, she made her company debut at the Metropolitan Opera, leading John Adams’s oratorio El Niño in a fully staged new production starring Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines. Other 2023-24 highlights include a new production of Bernstein’s Candide with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, an all-American program to inaugurate her four-season Philharmonia appointment, Penderecki’s seldom-heard opera The Black Mask with the Polish National Radio Symphony and returns to the podiums of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
In 2021, Alsop assumed the title of music director laureate and OrchKids founder of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which she continues to conduct each season. During her outstanding 14-year tenure as its music director, she led the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, released multiple award-winning recordings, and conducted more than two dozen world premieres, as well as founding OrchKids, its groundbreaking music education program for Baltimore’s most disadvantaged youth. In 2019, after seven years as music director, Alsop became conductor of honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), with which she continues to undertake major projects each season.
Deeply committed to new music, she was music director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years, leading 174 premieres. Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestras, and regularly guest conducts such major international ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and Orchestre de Paris, besides leading the La Scala Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and others. In collaboration with YouTube and Google Arts & Culture, she spearheaded the “Global Ode to Joy”, a crowd-sourced video project to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020.
Recognized with BBC Music “Album of the Year” and Emmy nominations in addition to GRAMMY, Classical BRIT and Gramophone awards, Alsop’s discography comprises more than 200 titles. These include recordings for Decca, Harmonia Mundi and Sony Classical, as well as her acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Recent releases include a live account of Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus; a Kevin Puts collection with the Baltimore Symphony; and the first installment of a complete Schumann symphonic cycle for Naxos with the Vienna RSO.
The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honored with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. Amongst many other awards and academic positions, she served as both 2021-22 Harman/Eisner Artist-in-Residence of the Aspen Institute Arts Program and 2020 artist-in-residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts; is director of graduate conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute; and holds Honorary Doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School.
To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow female conductors, in 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, which was renamed in her honor as the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2020. The Conductor, a documentary about her life, debuted at New York’s 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and has subsequently been broadcast on PBS television, screened at festivals and in theaters nationwide, and recognized with the Naples International Film Festival’s 2021 Focus on the Arts Award.
Conrad Tao
piano
Conrad Tao has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer and has been dubbed “...the kind of musician who is shaping the future of classical music” by New York Magazine, and an artist of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by The New York Times. Tao has performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony.
As a composer, his work has been performed by orchestras throughout the world; his first large scale orchestral work, Everything Must Go, received its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic, and its European premiere with the Antwerp Symphony, and he was the recipient of a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, for Outstanding Sound Design / Music Composition, for his work on More Forever, in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist—an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation.
In the 2023-24 season, Tao makes his subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing Gershwin’s Concerto in F major with James Gaffigan. He also re-unites with the New York Philharmonic to perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17, following his curated program for them last season as part of the Artist Spotlight series. Meanwhile, he celebrates the 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue with multiple performances of the work and a new companion piece commissioned from him by the Santa Rosa Symphony. His return engagements include performances with the Cincinnati Symphony alongside Matthias Pintscher, the Oregon Symphony alongside David Danzmayr, and the Seattle Symphony, whom he play-directs in Conrad Tao's Playlist, weaving Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 into an adventurous program of Stravinsky, Purcell, Linda Catlin Smith, and Morton Feldman. As part of the celebration of Rachmaninoff's 150th birthday, Tao brings Rachmaninoff Songbook to the 92NY and Germany’s Klavierfestival Ruhr, presenting a direct line from Rachmaninoff to the music of Billy Strayhorn, Harold Arlen, and Stephen Sondheim.
In a concert curated by Tao himself, Tao invites UK-based new-music collective Distractfold to make their NYC debut at Kaufman Music Center with the world premiere of Andrew Greenwald’s A Thing Made Whole VIII along with music by Jürg Frey, Hanna Hartman and Mauricio Pauly. This season also includes performances with dancer Caleb Teicher in the duo's Counterpoint program, which synthesizes the two seemingly disparate artforms of piano and tap dance. More collaborations include a multi-city tour throughout the season with the Junction Trio, including a program of John Zorn, Ives, and Beethoven at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the trio's Detroit debut, among many others.
In the 2022-23 season, Tao performed Mozart with the New York Philharmonic, for whom he also curated a program for their Artist Spotlight series, featuring collaborations with vocalist Charmaine Lee, and wind ensemble The Westerlies. Tao also made an appearance with the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom and the San Francisco Symphony, both as a soloist in Gershwin’s Concerto in F major at Davies Symphony Hall, and as a curator for their SoundBox series. In Washington, DC, he made his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra performing Shostakovich with Dalia Staveska, and, following Atlanta Symphony’s premiere of his Violin Concerto with Stefan Jackiw in 2021, he appeared as soloist with the orchestra performing Ravel with Ryan Bancroft. After their successful collaboration with the Finnish Radio Symphony, Tao further re-united with Hannu Lintu to perform Tchaikovsky with the Naples Philharmonic, as well as returned to Finland to open the season with the Tampere Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali.
A Warner Classics recording artist, Tao’s debut disc Voyages was declared a “spiky debut” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Of the album, NPR wrote: “Tao proves himself to be a musician of deep intellectual and emotional means”. His next album, Pictures, with works by David Lang, Toru Takemitsu, Elliott Carter, Mussorgsky, and Tao himself, was hailed by The New York Times as “a fascinating album [by] a thoughtful artist and dynamic performer…played with enormous imagination, color and command.” His third album, American Rage, featuring works by Julia Wolfe, Frederic Rzewski, and Aaron Copland, was released in the fall of 2019. In 2021, Tao and brass quartet The Westerlies released Bricolage, an album of improvisations and experiments recorded in a small cabin in rural New Hampshire in June 2019.
Tao was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1994. He has studied piano with Emilio del Rosario in Chicago and Yoheved Kaplinsky in New York, and composition with Christopher Theofanidis.
Program Highlights
- Marin Alsop, conductor
- Conrad Tao, piano
GERSHWIN Cuban Overture
BERNSTEIN Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
GERSHWIN Piano Concerto in F major
Program Notes
Cuban Overture (1932)
GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)
Cuban Overture
Cuba was a hot destination for Americans of the smart set in the early 1930s, and had been for a decade. The island nation was closely connected to the United States back then, before the dictatorships of Fulgencio Batista and later Fidel Castro. In World War I it had committed troops to the side of the Allies (as it would again in World War II), and it allowed the United States to dominate its economy, industry, and finances during the 1920s. It was not just tropical breezes and beckoning palms that drew American tourists. Between 1920 and 1933, Cuba offered something the United States did not: booze. Prohibition certainly didn’t keep Americans from imbibing at home, but the allure of doing so in the open proved a boon to the travel industry.
In February 1932, George Gershwin traveled to Cuba with a group of friends. “In Havana,” publisher Bennet Cerf recalled, “a 16-piece rhumba band serenaded him en masse at four in the morning outside his room at the old Almendares Hotel. Several outraged patrons left the hotel the next morning. George was so flattered that he promised to write a rhumba of his own.” A few months after returning home, Gershwin made good on his promise, producing a Rumba for piano four-hands. He then orchestrated it for the New York Philharmonic to introduce before an audience of 18,000 at the city’s Lewisohn Stadium, with four percussionists playing Cuban instruments standing in front of the orchestra, rather than at their usual location at the back, so the audience could see their exotic instruments. Three months later the piece got its second airing, which the composer himself conducted at a benefit concert in the Metropolitan Opera House—now under the new title Cuban Overture.
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1961)
LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-90)
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
As early as 1949, Leonard Bernstein and his friends Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form, finally opening in 1957 on Broadway, where it ran for 772 performances. “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune. The show remains an essential chapter in the history of American theater, and its engrossing tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture.
In the opening weeks of 1961, Bernstein assembled nine sections of his score into what he called the Symphonic Dances. The impetus was a gala fundraising concert for the New York Philharmonic’s pension fund, to be held the evening before Valentine’s Day. (One wonders if West Side Story is really ideal Valentine’s Day fare, but no matter). In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just completed the orchestration of West Side Story for its film version, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them not in the order in which they occur in the musical but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence derived from a strictly musical rationale. Two of the most popular favorites of the musical’s songs are found in the pages of the Symphonic Dances: “Somewhere” and “Maria” (in the Cha-Cha section), though not the also-beloved “America,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “I Feel Pretty,” or “Tonight.”
INTERMISSION
Piano Concerto in F major (1925)
GEORGE GERSHWIN
Piano Concerto in F major
Allegro
Adagio—Andante con moto
Allegro agitato
Among the musicians in the audience at the fabled 1924 premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was the conductor Walter Damrosch, who directed the New York Symphony from 1885 until its merger with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. He was so impressed that he immediately commissioned a concerto he could introduce with his orchestra. Gershwin happily accepted, but obligations on Broadway prevented him from buckling down on the project until 1925. That November, nervous about his skill as an orchestrator, he hired a 60-piece freelance orchestra for a run-through, after which he tightened the piece considerably, cutting expanses from each of the movements to yield a tighter work for the imminent premiere. The concert was completely sold out and the audience cheered rapturously at the conclusion of the Concerto in F. “Many persons had thought that the Rhapsody was only a happy accident,” Gershwin remarked later. “Well, I went out, for one thing, to show them that there was plenty more where that had come from. I made up my mind to do a piece of absolute music. The Rhapsody, as its title implies, was a blues impression. The concerto would be unrelated to any program. And that is exactly how I wrote it.”
He provided a description of his new piano concerto for the New York Herald-New York Tribune to print prior to its premiere. “The first movement,” he stated, “employs the Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given out by the kettledrums, supported by other percussion instruments, and with a Charleston motif introduced by ... horns, clarinets and violas. The principal theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, a second theme is introduced by the piano.”
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