LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No. 2 (1793-1795)
Perhaps, with somewhat false humility, the composer had told his publisher that this was “a piano concerto which, to be sure, I do not claim to be among my best,” and apologized to the printer for his “not very legible handwriting.” Though Beethoven had lived in Vienna for only two years and had performed mainly private concerts in the salons of the nobility, he had already made a name for himself as a pianist, and the public was eager to hear him. The Second Piano Concerto was premiered at a charity event for widows and orphans in 1795, with Beethoven as the soloist—his public debut—and with the solo part not fully written out. He worked on the score until the last minute, completing it a mere two days before the performance—a situation that would be repeated with other compositions in future years. At his rooms, copyists were literally waiting for Beethoven to write out the parts. When Beethoven was going off to Vienna to study with Haydn in 1792, his patron Count Ferdinand von Waldstein wrote in the young man’s autograph book: “May you receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn.” True to this prophetic wish this concerto is indeed strongly reminiscent of the Mozart piano concertos the Beethoven admired, though perhaps with a more robust orchestration and a bit more drama; for while he admired his predecessor, he wanted to make his own mark and be independent of Mozart’s influence. Despite its number, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was actually composed first, but withheld from publication until 1801 while undergoing frequent and considerable revisions (in the meantime, his Piano Concerto No. 1, second in order of composition, already had been published).

ALEXANDER VON ZEMLINSKY (1871-1942)
A Florentine Tragedy Opera in one act (1915/16); Libretto by Oscar Wilde/ translated by Max Meyerfeld
When Simone, a cloth merchant, returns home from a business trip he finds his wife Bianca in a compromising situation with Prince Guido Bardi. In the ensuing scene she doesn’t hide her hatred of Simone. The two men engage in a sadistic game: emboldened by his exalted social status, Guido taunts Simone, by arranging another tryst with Bianca and assaults the husband verbally, and implies that Bianca should be part of the business arrangements. The furious Simone fights back, strangling the Prince with his bare hands. Though no less guilty Bianca saves herself; impressed with her husband’s physical strength and powerful feelings, and fascinated by the crime committed on her behalf, she asks: “Why did you not tell me you are so strong?” Falling into her arms he replies: “Why did you not tell me you are so beautiful.” The couple reconciles over the lover’s corpse. The opera had strong resonance for Zemlinsky, who was an unattractive man with a strong libido. One of his students was the beautiful Alma Schindler (later Mrs. Gustav Mahler, and notorious as the serial mistress of the who’s who of Viennese society). Zemlinsky fell for her too, but she disposed of him—not hiding her feelings about his lack of physical good looks (she called him “a hideous gnome”). Alma protested about the libretto when she saw the opera, but the composer shot back: “The husband’s passion for his work leads him to overlook his wife’s beauty, while the woman at his side, finding herself cheated of her youth and physical appeal, becomes a slave to apathy, dejection and open hatred. To bring the two back to reality, a terrible catastrophe is called for. This is a real tragedy, because one life has to be sacrificed to save two others. And you, of all people, have failed to understand that?! Why did you not tell me you were so…weak?” The great Irish playwright Oscar Wilde wrote a draft for A Florentine Tragedy, but it disappeared for a time, reappearing after his death. Zemlinsky made many changes and started composing in 1915 but its premiere was delayed by legal problems with copyrights until 1917. But once settled, the work quickly had four productions, albeit of various levels of quality. The sweeping, sensuous score is reminiscent of Wagner in its use of leitmotifs (particularly the motifs of love and death) and echoes the opulent late-Romantic style of Mahler and Strauss. Powerful emotions…powerful music.

JAMES CONLON
Conductor, born in 1950 in New York
A born and bred New Yorker, James Conlon came to music quite by happy coincidence: when he was 11, he tagged along with a friend whose mother had started a local opera company. The next thing he knew, he wanted to take piano and violin lessons, he started attending opera performances in the City, sang as a boy soprano, and dreamed of becoming an opera singer. He graduated from the High School of Music and Art and then attended the Juilliard School, and again, by being at the right place at the right time, made his professional debut in 1971 at the renowned Spoleto (Italy) Festival conducting Boris Godunov; a year later, at the behest of the legendary soprano Maria Callas, he made his New York debut in 1972 with La Bohème while still a Juilliard student. Though he divides his time equally between the concert hall and the opera house, his understanding and love of the vocal repertoire has been a powerful constant in his professional life, acknowledged by colleagues like Plácido Domingo: “I have always been struck by his exceptional musical perception and uncanny understanding of voices.” He has conducted at the world’s most prestigious opera houses, including more than 250 performances at the Metropolitan Opera alone, and since 1979, has been Music Director of the Cincinnati May Festival, America’s oldest choral festival. In 2006 James Conlon launched a 3-year program that focuses on the lives and music of composers impacted by the Holocaust: Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, and, of course, Alexander Zemlinsky, whose A Florentine Tragedy James Conlon conducts at the Philharmonic. Concerts, symposia, and expositions bring the achievements of these long-neglected artists to international attention. He explains: “With its systematic suppression of Jewish musicians, artists and writers, the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical landscape. Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose music was banned and buried by the Nazi regime in the 1930s, today is in the course of rediscovery, along with many other victims of that tyranny”; and, he continues, “those who performed, wrote or taught classical music after 1945 did so with enormous omissions. I believe that this entire ‘lost generation’ embodies a spirit that needs to be heard.” His discovery of Zemlinsky came quite by accident in the 1990s while he was General Music Director of the City of Cologne, Germany; he heard his tone poem The Mermaid on his car radio. Never one to do anything half-heartedly, he immediately threw himself into performing and recording Zemlinsky’s musical canon. “We eventually recorded everything he wrote for orchestra, and three of the eight operas. I came to love this composer’s music as if I had known it all my life.” In 1999 James Conlon received the Zemlinsky Prize, given only once before, for his efforts in bringing the composer’s music to international attention. “Music lives by being performed. It’s not enough to know that it exists somewhere in a library. …Zemlinsky should be up there beside other composers we know.”

Two-time Grammy Award-winning American tenor Anthony Dean Griffey has performed leading roles at opera houses around the world, and has collaborated with many of today’s preeminent conductors, including Alan Gilbert, Kurt Masur, James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, Michael Tilson Thomas, Sir Andrew Davis, Esa Pekka Salonen, Donald Runnicles, Sir Colin Davis, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, James Conlon, and Charles Dutoit. His 2009–2010 season concert performances include highlights from Beethoven’s Fidelio and Symphony No. 9 with the New World Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas; Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the London Symphony Orchestra and Bernard Haitink; appearances with the San Diego Symphony and Jahja Ling and with the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest Holland at Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, where he also reprises Britten’s War Requiem; and the role of the Preacher in Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath with the Collegiate Chorale at Carnegie Hall. Also this season, Mr. Griffey brings his signature role, the title role in Britten’s Peter Grimes, to Western Australia Opera; his critically acclaimed 2008 performance of Peter Grimes in a new production with The Metropolitan Opera was broadcast live in HD worldwide to movie theaters, featured on PBS, and released on DVD (EMI Classics.) Also on DVD, Mr. Griffey can be seen in the Grammy-winning Los Angeles Opera production of Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Euroarts), and the world premiere of Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Image Entertainment) with the San Francisco Opera. This season he performs a recital at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, and at Lawrence University with his frequent collaborator, fellow-North Carolinian pianist Warren Jones. He last appeared with the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in June 2009 — Lorin Maazel’s final concerts as New York Philharmonic Music Director.

JAMES JOHNSON
Baritone, born in 1946 in Port Sulphur, Louisiana
James Johnson received his musical training at Louisiana State University and at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His first engagements soon followed, at the Braunschweig State Theater, and at the Cologne and Graz operas where, having made the switch from bass to heroic baritone, he began to undertake the most important roles for that voice range. He made his 1987 Bayreuth festival debut in Werner Herzog’s Lohengrin production in 1987, and has since appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Chicago Lyric Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Deutsche Oper Berlin, as well as in opera houses in Japan, Greece, Denmark, Brussels, France, and many others. He is known particularly for his interpretations of the heroic baritone roles of Wagner and Richard Strauss, but his repertoire extends from the Baroque to the modern era. He is also acclaimed for his work on the concert stage and has appeared with such renowned orchestras as the Berlin, Los Angeles, and Munich philharmonics, and the Vienna Symphony. His discography includes recordings of Schöck’s Penthesilea, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, Zimmermann’s Requiem for a Young Poet, and Schoenberg’s Jacob’s Ladder. James Johnson is appearing in A Florentine Tragedy under James Conlon not only at the Philharmonic, but also at the 2007 Ravinia Festival in Chicago. “The role of Simone is a wonderful vocal challenge because it calls on my entire dynamic and interpretive range. Zemlinsky was very sensitive to the text when composing this opera. The music is lush and romantic, almost overwhelming in its richness, and immediately appealing to the audience.” Having sung the demanding role both on stage as well as in a concert format, he says there are pros and cons for both. “On the one hand when singing in a staged production, the role requires a great deal more physicality than in a concert performance; on the other hand, in a concert setting I tend to feel somewhat inhibited by the surroundings.”

“James Johnson sang with admirable technique and stamina in this testing role [Simone]. He clearly understands the Zemlinsky idiom and did nothing false or thoughtless with potentially melodramatic utterances. There are few Heldenbaritones around, and it’s easy to see why Johnson finds steady employment internationally.” Classics Today

TATIANA PAVLOVSKAYA
Soprano, born in 1969 in Murmask, Russia
Tatiana Pavlovskaya graduated in 1994 from the famed Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St Petersburg and has appeared regularly at the city’s legendary Mariinsky Theatre (as well as on its international tours) since her debut there in Eugene Onegin in 1995. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera and at Carnegie Hall in 1998 as Maria in Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, sang in a concert performance of Parsifal conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Salzburg Festival, at a Buckingham Palace gala with Plácido Domingo, the Paris Opera, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, and at La Scala. Her 2006 performances included the role of Vitellia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Washington Opera, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 at the Ravinia Festival and the Orquestra Sinfonica de Sao Paolo, The Bells with the WDR Orchestra conducted by Semyon Bychkov, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 with the Russian National Philharmonic, Britten’s War Requiem with the Munich Philharmonic under James Conlon’s direction, and a triple bill of Russian one act operas with the Los Angeles Opera, also conducted by James Conlon. Classics Today describe her voice as “radiant” and danceviewdc wrote about her performance as Maria in Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa: “Tatiana Pavlovskaya’s … voice is dark and sweet and rich, like fine chocolate, and her singing had a free, conversational tone to it as well. She’s alone on stage at the end, part Ophelia, part Giselle, beyond reality, singing a lullaby for all the deaths, over the body of Andrey, the boy next door…”

JONATHAN BISS, piano, born in 1980 in Bloomington, Indiana
Our 30-year-old soloist came by his musical genes honestly—being the grandson of cellist Raya Garbousova (for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto) and the son of renowned musician-parents, violinist Miriam Fried and violinist/violist Paul Biss. (He says teasingly that he made his own Carnegie Hall debut while still in the womb, when his mother was giving a concert there.) He started his piano lessons at age 6, and quite naturally collaborated first with his parents. His training continued at Indiana University and later at the Curtis Institute, where he studied with Leon Fleisher. Now, with an international concertizing career that takes him to all parts of the globe, Jonathan Biss can be heard on concert and recital stages from New York to Istanbul. He first appeared with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur’s direction in 2001. In a Carnegie Hall interview he spoke about coming to music-making. “The decision to play an instrument was completely inevitable to me….I can’t remember a time when I really considered anything else too seriously…I was taken enough with music that it was absolutely clear that it was what I had to do. It wasn’t even a choice. The choice had been made internally already.” Such reflections on his art seem fitting for the Beethoven concerto he performs: “Music deals in the realm of the unknown and the mysterious. It heals the soul. I do believe … that people who have music in their lives are better people. They’re more peace-loving and more thoughtful. …When you have the experience of something so profound, you’re changed and marked by it.” On a more practical level, playing piano is “a 24-hour a day proposition,” and Biss recalls how it was sometimes challenging being in a household where three people had to have a space to practice.

“Biss played the concerto with a clean, often brilliant technique. Even better was the radiant energy that seemed to fly from his fingertips and that filled this familiar music with passion, curiosity and start-to-finish excitement.” Boston Herald

“This civilized and aristocratic playing sounded almost like the music-making of the golden age—unhurried, humane and uncompromised in its integrity... he is a huge talent.” The Baltimore Sun

Find additional upcoming performances with Jonathan Biss