SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
Violin Concerto No. 1 (1917)
Instead of premièring his First Violin Concerto in Russia, where the political climate was unfavorable, Prokofiev took the work to France. A hot bed of the avant garde, Paris gave it only a lukewarm reception; it was considered too tame! Today, the concerto’s appealing attributes—from electrifying to lyrical—make it a popular work of the concert stage and a virtuoso vehicle for performers.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 5 (1808)
“Thus fate knocks at the door!” Whether this attribution to Beethoven about the four opening chords of his grand Fifth is true or not, no one really knows, but the notes “ba-ba-ba-BAH” are practically embedded in our DNA. No other symphony has such instant recognition. Rising from this unmistakable 4-note motif, its euphoric path transports the listener from tragedy to triumph, from darkness into the light. The creation of the Fifth extended over five years, a period when Beethoven was confronting his growing deafness, unhappy love affairs, and other personal crises. Its Viennese premiere took place under less than favorable circumstances—a marathon benefit concert sponsored by Beethoven himself, in the depth of winter, in an unheated concert hall, with programming totaling about four hours. A musician playing that night quipped: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing—and still more of the loud.” The symphony’s birth was difficult, as Leonard Bernstein observed: “The man rejected, rewrote, scratched out, tore up, and sometimes altered a passage as often as twenty times. Beethoven’s manuscript looks like a bloody record of a tremendous inner battle.” Nevertheless, the symphony’s transition from C Minor to C Major during its mighty course—shouted out joyfully and repeatedly at the climax—brings the immortal Fifth to a glorious conclusion.

Marin Alsop was appointed the 12th music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, beginning with the 2007–08 season. She is the first woman to head a major American orchestra, mirroring her ongoing success in the United Kingdom as principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra since 2002. The first artist to win both Gramophone’s “Artist of the Year” award and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s conductor’s award in the same season, Ms. Alsop was named a MacArthur Fellow and won the Classical Brit Award for Best Female Artist that year — the first conductor to receive this prestigious American honor. She has also received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award and European Women of Achievement Award.

Ms. Alsop is a regular guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. She is also one of the few conductors to appear every season with both the London Symphony and the London Philharmonic orchestras, and has appeared as a guest conductor with many other distinguished orchestras worldwide, including Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle, Orchestre de Paris, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Tokyo Philharmonic.

Highlights of Marin Alsop’s recording collaboration with Naxos include a Brahms symphony cycle with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and an ongoing series of Bournemouth Symphony CDs of music by Bartók, Bernstein, Orff, and several living American composers. One of her first projects as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will be a Dvořák symphonic cycle. Ms. Alsop can also be heard regularly as a commentator on NPR’s Weekend Edition segment “Marin on Music,” and on BBC’s Radio 3.

In 2006, Marin Alsop was the only classical musician invited to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, alongside presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs of the world’s most powerful companies. She is a native of New York City, attended Yale University, and received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School. She last appeared with the New York Philharmonic in July 2006 at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz came to national attention in 1994 when she made her Carnegie Hall debut performing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The performance was immediately followed by her debut recording of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos for Philips Classics. Since then, she has appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and NHK Symphony Orchestra. She has collaborated with conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, Valery Gergiev, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Charles Dutoit, and Franz Welser-Möst, among others. Ms. Josefowicz’s recent and upcoming European engagements include appearances with the Munich, Czech, and Oslo philharmonic orchestras, and the Bamberg and BBC symphony orchestras, and recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Barbican and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw. In January 2002 her performance of John Adams’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony, conducted by the composer, was televised and broadcast by the BBC throughout Europe. She is a graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Jaime Laredo and Jascha Brodsky. She received a 1994 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and is making her New York Philharmonic debut in this concert