JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Serenade No. 1 (1858)
In 1853, five years before he completed his Serenade No. 1, Brahms had made the acquaintance of Robert and Clara Schumann, two people who would become his comrades-in-music, his champions, and friends. They encouraged the talented young man to write in the symphonic genre, though his first symphony would not come about till much later. In the meantime Brahms tried his wings with orchestral works like the present Serenade, which he spoke of at first as a “Symphony-Serenade,” as though he couldn’t quite decide on its classification. While it began as a nonet he eventually expanded its orchestration, and in 1860 it was finally premiered as the six-movement Serenade No. 1, conducted by the composer’s friend Joseph Joachim. Its lyrical, fresh, and charming music is a delight to hear.

Riccardo Muti was born in Naples, Italy, where he studied piano at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella under Vincenzo Vitale, graduating with distinction. He was subsequently awarded a diploma in composition and conducting by the Conservatory “Giuseppe Verdi,” Milan. He first came to the attention of critics and the public in 1967, when he was unanimously awarded first place in the Guido Cantelli Conductors Competition in Milan. The following year he was appointed principal conductor of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, a position he maintained until 1980. In 1971 he was invited by Herbert von Karajan to conduct at the Salzburg Festival, the first of many occasions that led, in 2001, to a celebration of 30 years of artistic collaboration.

During the 1970s Mr. Muti was the London Philharmonia’s chief conductor (1972–82), succeeding Otto Klemperer. In 1980 he succeeded Eugene Ormandy as music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra, where he remained until 1992. From 1986 to 2005 he was music director of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, overseeing projects such as the Mozart-Da Ponte Trilogy and the Wagner Ring Cycle, in addition to bringing many less-performed and neglected works to light. His long tenure culminated on December 7, 2004, in the re-opening of the restored La Scala, with Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta, originally commissioned for La Scala’s inaugural opening night performance in 1778.

Over the course of his career, Riccardo Muti has conducted most of the world’s important orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, and the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra with which he has particularly close ties, and with which he has appeared at the Salzburg Festival since 1971. In April 2003 the French national radio channel, France Musique, broadcast a “Journée Riccardo Muti,” comprising 14 hours of his operatic and symphonic recordings. On December 14, 2003, he conducted the opening concert of the newly-renovated opera house “La Fenice” in Venice. In 2004 Mr. Muti founded the “Luigi Cherubini” Youth Orchestra comprising young musicians selected by an international committee from 600 instrumentalists throughout Italy. With the Cherubini Orchestra he is leading a five-year project dedicated to the Neapolitan School of the 18th century for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.

On May 5, 2008, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association appointed Mr. Muti as its tenth music director; he will begin his five-year contract in September 2010. In the same season he will start as director of the Rome Opera House. Riccardo Muti’s last appearance with the New York Philharmonic was in November 2009. He is scheduled to return on April 14–17, 2010. For more information, visit www.riccardomuti.com.

Daniel Boico, the newly appointed New York Philharmonic Assistant Conductor, will lead all of the Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts in the 2009-10 season. Mr. Boico made his New York Philharmonic debut on January 23, 2009, conducting an Inside the Music program.

Mr. Boico has served as music director of the Skokie Valley Symphony Orchestra, Illinois, and the Skokie Concert Choir, as well as conductor of the Elgin Youth Symphony Philharmonia and as an assistant conductor to Cliff Colnot of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. He was visiting professor and director of orchestras at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, a cover conductor for the Milwaukee Symphony, and an apprentice conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he worked closely with and was assistant to music director Daniel Barenboim, principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and other visiting artists.

Born in Israel and raised in Paris and the United States, Daniel Boico studied with and assisted Russian professor Ilya Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. A prize winner at the Prokofiev and Pedrotti conducting competitions, Mr. Boico has led numerous orchestras, including the Moscow Philharmonic, Novosibirsk Philharmonic, Perm Opera and Ballet, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, La Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional in Mexico City. In August 2000 he made a world premiere recording of Nino Rota’s cello concertos with cellist Dimitry Yablonsky and I Virtuosi Italiani for the Chandos label.

Find additional upcoming performances with Daniel Boico

In the 2008-2009 season, pianist Shai Wosner appears in recitals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including London's Wigmore Hall, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the 92nd Street Y in New York. Recent and upcoming orchestral engagements include his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, his return to the Atlanta Symphony (with Donald Runnicles) and the Houston Symphony (with Hans Graf), the Indianapolis Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Fresno Philharmonic and North Carolina Symphony. He also continues his extensive performing and recording activity as a BBC New Generation Artist, which he was named in September 2007. His residency this season, to be broadcast throughout the BBC Radio 3 network, encompasses recital, chamber-music and concerto repertoire, as well as directing two Mozart concerti from the keyboard.

In 2005, Wosner won an Avery Fisher Career Grant. In the same year, he received a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, which led to the joint commission (by the Trust and the 92nd St. Y) of Michael Hersch's Chamber Concerto for Piano and 13 Players. Based on poetry by Zbigniew Herbert, the work will be premiered in New York at the 92nd St. Y during the 2009–2010 season.

In recent seasons he has appeared with numerous major orchestras in North America and Europe, including re-engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the National Arts Centre Orchestra and performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, Columbus and Memphis; the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; Staatskapelle Berlin, the Gothenburg Symphony, the Barcelona Symphony, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Orchestre National de Belgique, among others. In 2006 he debuted with the Vienna Philharmonic during the 250th anniversary celebrations of Mozart's birth, in Salzburg. He has worked with conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Alan Gilbert, Peter Oundjian, James Conlon, James Judd and Yan Pascal Tortelier.

As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with numerous esteemed artists including Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell, Cho-Liang Lin and Christian Tetzlaff. From 2002–2004 he was a member of Lincoln's Center's Chamber Music Society Two. He regularly performs at various chamber music festivals, including Chamber Music Northwest in Portland and La Jolla's SummerFest. Other summer festival appearances include the Ravinia Festival, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Grand Teton Music Festival, and Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. His many chamber music engagements in the 2008-2009 season include a performance of the Mozart concerto for three pianos with Joseph Kalichstein and Alon Goldstein and the New York String Orchestra with Jaime Laredo at Carnegie Hall.

For several consecutive summers, Wosner was also involved in the West-Eastern Divan Workshop led by Daniel Barenboim and toured as soloist with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Born in Israel, Mr. Wosner enjoyed a broad musical education from a very early age, studying piano with Emanuel Krasovsky as well as composition, theory, and improvisation with André Hajdu. He later studied at the Juilliard School with Emanuel Ax.

Shai lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

The Életfa Hungarian Folk Band is a group of seven performers from the New Jersey-New York area that presents Hungary’s folk music and song and dance culture through demonstrations. The group’s members specialize in presenting authentic, archaic folklore from the villages of present-day Hungary, Transylvania, Romania, Slovakia, and beyond. Since its formation in 1987, Életfa has performed across the country and in Canada in venues such as the Library of Congress, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Clearwater Revival Festival, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Liberty State Park, Manhattan’s Town Hall, World Trade Center, and American Museum of Natural History.

Screen and stage actor Alec Baldwin received the 2008 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his starring role in the current television series, 30 Rock; he won the 2007 Golden Globe, SAG, and Television Critics Association awards for the same role. The Long Island native also has starred on Knot’s Landing on CBS and numerous other television shows, including the miniseries Dress Grey and Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.

On Broadway Mr. Baldwin appeared in The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2006 revival of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, directed by Scott Ellis, and with Roundabout’s 2004 revival of Hecht and MacArthur’s The Twentieth Century, directed by Walter Bobbie, co-starring Anne Heche. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the 1992 revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and for an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for the television movie of the same production. He won an Obie Award for the 1991 Off-Broadway production of Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss, and a Theatre World Award in 1986 for his turn on Broadway in Joe Orton’s Loot. He has also performed on Broadway in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money.

Alec Baldwin’s films include Beetlejuice, Miami Blues, The Hunt for Red October, Malice, The Shadow, Glengarry Glen Ross, Heaven’s Prisoners, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Edge, The Cat in the Hat, The Aviator, The Departed, Running with Scissors, and The Good Shepherd. He received the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Cooler, directed by Wayne Kramer (2003) and was nominated for an Oscar for the same film. Mr. Baldwin is the author of A Promise to Ourselves (St. Martin’s Press). He made his New York Philharmonic debut narrating the Inside the Music program on October 10, 2008.

Joseph Horowitz is the author of eight books. Both his Classical Music in America: A History and Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts deal extensively with Dvořák in America. As the director of a national education project for the National Endowment for the Humanities, he also created a work of historical fiction for middle and high school readers, Dvorák in America, and commissioned an interactive DVD, From the New World: A Celebrated Composer’s American Odyssey. As an artistic consultant, Mr. Horowitz has created six Dvorák festivals — the first of which was presented by the Brooklyn Philharmonic during his tenure as executive director. Mr. Horowitz is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a certificate of appreciation from the Czech Parliament for his “exceptional explorations of Dvořák’s historic sojourn in the United States.” He is also co-founder and artistic director of Post-Classical Ensemble of Washington, D.C., and of Post-Classical Productions, which this season and next begins producing thematic, inter-disciplinary concerts in New York City and Chicago.