AVNER DORMAN (born in 1975 in Tel Aviv, Israel)
Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! (2006)
According to Avner Dorman, the heady concerto Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! “refers to three substances that are extremely appealing, yet filled with danger. Spices delight the palate, but can cause illness; perfumes seduce, but can also betray; toxins bring ecstasy, but are deadly. The concerto combines Middle Eastern drums, orchestral percussion, and rock drums with orchestral forces—a unique sound both enticing and dangerous.” The piece was commissioned by Zubin Mehta, PercaDu, and the Israel Philharmonic who premiered the work in 2006. Dorman and members of PercaDu (Tomer Yariv and Adi Morag) had worked together closely on the creation of an earlier piece, Udacrep Akubrad (that’s PercaDu Darbuka spelled backwards), which reflects young Israeli culture and has a markedly Israeli character, achieved by using four darbukas and tom-toms. Udacrep Akubrad has become one of PercaDu’s signature pieces and provides the basis for the first movement, Spices, which is also inspired by Middle Eastern and Indian influences, and employs “repetitive minimalism as it appears in the music traditions of the East and the works of Western minimalists of the past forty years.” The magical Perfumes adds vibraphone to the sound palette in a style that Dorman describes as “multicultural polyphony,” for example, elements that evoke Baroque arias, Middle Eastern folk music, and jazz, and “express the diversity of our time and culture. As the movement progresses, the soloists and orchestra embark on a colorful journey from the seductive to the dangerous.” In the last tour de force section, Toxins, the duo and orchestra pull out all the stops, and, says the composer, “it swings like a pendulum between extreme joyous ecstasy and obsessive anxiety, pain, and delusions. As the movement develops, the music becomes increasingly fanatical until the final outburst of catharsis and death.” PercaDu has performed Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! throughout the world to great acclaim, and the exciting piece is bound to engage, thrill, and amaze Philharmonic audiences.

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-19945)
Concerto for Orchestra (1943)
The commission of the Concerto for Orchestra, Bartók’s last completed orchestral work, came about as an act of kindness at the suggestion of fellow-Hungarian expats, conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti, and was set in motion by Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitzky. Bartók had fled Nazi-occupied Hungary and had come to the United States in 1940, but he felt displaced and depressed, seriously ill with leukemia and in dire financial straits. He thought his life as a composer was finished. His friends sought to revive his spirits and devised a secret scheme to commission a work. Koussevitzky visited the emaciated Bartók in the hospital and offered him $1,000 for a new piece for orchestra in honor of his late wife, Natalie Koussevitzky. Had proud Bartók known, he would never have accepted such “charity.” But fortunately for posterity he didn’t, and the result is one of the 20th century’s musical highpoints. The Concerto for Orchestra was premiered to great acclaim by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1944. Bartók supplied some explanatory guideposts for his composition, which is constructed like a palindrome or arch: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third to the life-assertion of the last one.” Every section of the orchestra and every principal player gets a place in the spotlight in this magnificent showpiece, which ends in a whirlwind of a fugue for all forces. A bit of an inside joke related to the Intermezzo interrotto: Bartók’s “interruption” is a parody of the first movement of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony (which conflates “I’m Going to Maxim’s” from Léhar’s The Merry Widow” with a relentless march). Apparently Bartók had heard it played over and over on the radio and found it terribly banal.

ZUBIN MEHTA
Conductor, born in 1936 in Bombay, India
Zubin Mehta’s illustrious career is well-known to New York audiences; he was part of this city’s arts scene from 1978 to1991 when he was leader of the New York Philharmonic —the longest tenure in the orchestra’s history. His father, a violinist, was the founding conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, and perhaps prophetically, Maestro Mehta was born on the first anniversary of that ensemble’s beginnings. Although he had initially planned a career in medicine, he soon followed in his father’s footsteps and turned to music. When he went to Vienna to study with Hans Swarowski, the legendary teacher predicted he would become “a great figure in the history of music”—something that soon became a reality. His many posts as head of renowned orchestras include the Montreal Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic. He has conducted the latter in over two thousand concerts, including tours spanning five continents, and was made its Music Director for Life in 1981. He also has developed a reputation for creating notable musical events; for example, in 1988, Maestro Mehta and the Philharmonic performed together with the State Symphony Orchestra of the Soviet Ministry of Culture in Moscow’s Gorky Park; in June 1994, he led the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Requiem among the ruins of the National Library; in 1999, he conducted the Bavarian State Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic side by side in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony near Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp; and he worked on a production of Turandot with Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, performed in Florence, Italy, and Beijing. “I think music should be used to bring people together— to make people who don’t normally smile at each other sit next to one another in a concert hall,” he says. “In a concert there are only positive vibes. There is only peace.” His lifetime of achievements has been recognized by his many honors and awards, including in December 2006 the “Kennedy Center Honor.” The New Yorker profiled him, and Time put him on its cover. Maestro Mehta is the subject of a documentary film, Portrait of Zubin Mehta and of a book by Martin Bookspan and Ross Yockey, Zubin: the Zubin Mehta Story. Popular culture fun fact: he conducted Also Sprach Zarathustra for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“A virtuosic performance” (The New York Times)

PERCADU
Percussion duo (ADI MORAG, born in 1976 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and TOMER YARIV, born in 1976 in Givat Smuel, Israel)
PercaDu is a dynamic young Israeli percussion duo that has already generated worldwide interest and enthusiasm through their unique style of virtuoso, energetic, and intense playing. Their repertoire consists of their own compositions, arrangements for percussion of classical pieces by Bach, Chopin, Ravel, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and others, and contemporary music written by Israeli composers (Avner Dorman, Yaron Gottfried, Lior Nabok and others) and composers on the international music scene, such as Per Nørgard (Denmark), Nigel Westlake (Australia), Andres Kopel (Denmark), and Salvator Brotons (Spain). Since founding PercaDu in 1996 in collaboration with Alon Bor (principal percussionist in the Israel Philharmonic), Tomer Yariv and Adi Morag have won several prizes in international competitions, such as the first prize at the Percussive Arts Society International Competition in Columbus, Ohio and the Jury and Audience prizes at the International Percussion Competition in Luxembourg. In 2001, PercaDu won first prize as “Best chamber music ensemble” at the Aviv Music Competitions and received Israel’s Minister of Culture Prize for Excellence in Music. In 2001, the Duo was brought under the wing of the Jerusalem Music Centre founded by Isaac Stern. This collaboration led to the production of their debut CD PercaDu – Works for Marimba and Percussion, which also includes and several works composed for and dedicated to them. One of these pieces is Spices, Perfumes and Toxins! a concerto written for the duo by Avner Dorman. Since their performance at the Verbier Festival 2007 under the baton of Zubin Mehta, PercaDu has been in great demand all over the world. He said of them: “Adi & Tomer—PercaDu, are going to prove to you something that even we as musicians find it hard to believe…that we have in our midst two individuals who can achieve that kind of virtuosity and understanding of these instruments.”

“These musicians seem to have four arms each, just like the ancient Indian gods…musical wizards, percussion geniuses, two people with eight hands…PercaDu stun audiences with their mystical multi-ethnic moods.” (Fifth Introvert Music Festival 2006 Magazine, Riga)

“Yaraiv and Morag managed to tease a range of textures and colors out of their instruments that would have many pianists turn green with envy…they are moving about the stage with dramatic grace, their sense of showmanship is always subordinate to the music….” (The Jerusalem Post)

STEVEN STUCKY
Host of Hear & Now, born in 1949 in Hutchinson, Kansas
Not everyone in the pantheon of today’s composer can claim to have spent time on a farm in Pretty Prairie, Kansas. But Steven Stucky can. It’s also on the prairie that he took up the viola as a boy of 10. Now he’s a music professor at Cornell, his alma mater, and has other prestigious appointments in the music world. At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for example, where he is Consulting Composer for New Music, one responsibility is to study scores of other living composers hoping to have their works performed. His credentials make him the perfect choice for the New York Philharmonic’s three Hear and Now concerts this season, in which he leads adventurous music lovers into explorations of new works by fellow American composers—usually in the company of those composers. The programs begin one hour before concert start time, and an abbreviated version of his remarks takes place during the concert itself. Steven Stucky knows each of the composers featured on Hear and Now: Elliott Carter, Avner Dorman, and Peter Lieberson, and says: “I can’t think of three more different composers, but who are so perfect for a Hear and Now treatment. Elliott Carter, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this season, is charming and holds audiences in his hand; Avner Dorman is hot, hot, hot in music circles today, yet his music is approachable and energetic. And Peter Lieberson is a gentle, kind, warm, generous person who writes some of the most beautiful music today.” Steven Stucky will get ready for Hear and Now by studying the scores, communicating with the composers, and attending rehearsals. He believes the secret to opening up fearlessly to new music is to make a human connection between audience and composer—the approach taken in Hear and Now presentations. “The fact that someone is talking to you about the music is almost more important than what the person says. The barriers are taken down when the composer and the audience think of themselves as allies. Call it ‘rooting for the home team.’ That way everybody wins.”