LUIGI CHERUBINI (1760-1842)
Overture (1815)
Cherubini was a real survivor of the violently changing political tides of post-French Revolution Paris, his adopted home: his music could “go with the flow”—as shown, for example, by the fact that he wrote music to celebrate the beheading of Louis XVI in 1796, and then his most famous work, the Requiem in C, for a memorial service for the same king in 1817. No less a luminary than Beethoven called Cherubini “the greatest of all living writers for the stage.” Maestro Riccardo Muti is credited in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians with “stimulating interest in Cherubini’s oeuvre in the last 50 years.” He says: “Deep within Luigi Cherubini’s music a fire burns.” Florence-born Cherubini is best known for his 30 operas, especially Médée and Les deux journées, said to have influenced Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. He was highly regarded by his contemporaries and his reputation extended far beyond the borders of France, where he settled in 1786.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor” (1809)
Composed while Vienna was under siege by Napoleon’s armies, Beethoven’s last piano concerto was born under the sign of war. “What a destructive, unruly life around me! Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of all sorts!” wrote the nearly deaf composer. To protect his deteriorating hearing from the noise, Beethoven had sought refuge in a friend’s basement and covered his ears with pillows. Yet his despair amid the chaos is never manifested in the score; the music remains defiant, rebellious, triumphant. This concerto concluded one of Beethoven’s most vibrantly productive periods, in which he created an astonishing number of masterpieces (including four symphonies, the Piano Concerto No. 4, the opera Fidelio, the Violin Concerto, the three astonishing “Razumovsky” String Quartets, and two of his great piano sonatas—the “Appassionata” and the “Waldstein”). Sadly, however, it is the only one of his five piano concertos that he did not premiere himself; his near total deafness had robbed him of his celebrity as a piano virtuoso. Beethoven introduced something new in this piece: where soloists would normally expect to improvise and show off their technical abilities in a cadenza, he wrote in the score: “do not play a cadenza, but immediately begin the following.” He notated an enhanced cadenza-like passage that continues to work the thematic materials and then proceeds to the end of the first movement. After its Leipzig premiere in 1811, a journalist proclaimed: “It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos.” It is ironic that this concerto should come to be known as “Emperor” (the nickname was appended after Beethoven’s death and refers not to Napoleon, but to the work’s regal temperament); it was Napoleon’s power grab, after all, that so disillusioned and infuriated the composer of the Third Symphony that he tore its original title page and changed the dedication from “Buonapart” to “Sinfonia Eroica, Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man.”). Political implications aside, Beethoven’s masterpiece speaks with both majesty and poetry—a crowning achievement indeed.

PAUL HINDEMITH (1895-1963)
Sancta Susanna (1921)
What scandalized the public about Paul Hindemith’s one-act opera Santa Susanna was not the music, which is brilliantly executed, but the shocking subject matter of the story. Santa Susanna depicts sexuality among cloistered nuns, punished by institutional condemnation. While praying together in their chapel one May night, Sister Susanna and Sister Klementia encounter two young lovers, and soon Klementia relates an event that happened when she was a young nun: she came upon a fellow-nun, naked, embracing the crucified Jesus on the cross. Her order punished her by immuring her alive in the walls of the chapel. As Susanna listens to this story, she disrobes and approaches the crucifix, seeking physical union with Jesus. Though Klementia tries to bring her to her senses, Susanna calls out “Build a wall for me.” As the other nuns approach they condemn her as “Satana,”a devil. Sancta Susanna is the last of a triptych of operas that also includes Murder, Hope of Women and Das Nusch-Nuschi, composed by Hindemith in the post-World War I years. They are connected through the thematic content of sexuality, repression, punishment, and violence, seen from different points of view and through different musical treatments. The operas scandalized the public and the press, where he was fiercely attacked. The handwriting seemed to be on the wall, and, though not a Jew, his “degenerate” music soon became an object of Nazi persecution. He was forced to flee and eventually came to the United States. Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in the entire triptych at Avery Fisher Hall in 2004, and Riccardo Muti led a concert version of Sancta Susanna at the 2005 Ravenna Festival.

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.

Find additional upcoming performances with Riccardo Muti

LANG LANG, piano, born in 1982 in Shenyang, China
Lang Lang recalls that when he was just two years old he watched a “Tom & Jerry” cartoon in which Tom plays Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” on the piano. “From that moment on, there was only one thing I wanted: to play the piano.” His father was his first piano teacher, and his mother taught him how to read music. They made great sacrifices to provide the best for their only child (Lang Lang was born when China’s one-child-policy was in force). Among the highpoints of his amazing career his 1999 breakthrough stands out—when he made a dramatic last-minute substitution for an ailing André Watts at the Ravinia Festival in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Since then, he has appeared across the globe to great audience and critical acclaim. In an interview for Deutsche Grammophon, Lang Lang recalls: “When I was very little I heard Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and was really touched by the beautiful melodies and all the exciting passages. And so, since my childhood it’s been a life dream to perform this concerto….When I was nine years old I started to practice it. And then when I was 13, I played it for the first time, in Beijing with the China Youth Orchestra.” He acknowledges that there are special challenges playing such a well-known work: “First, you must respect everything that’s written in the score. Then you need to play not only with your heart, but with your soul, because this piece has real emotional power—it’s like somebody who’s had tremendous life experiences—some are super exciting but some are deeply tragic. At the beginning of the second movement, everything is reborn, you have the most beautiful flute solo, and when the piano comes in, it’s like waterfalls—so beautiful and so pure. When I play that movement I just enjoy myself. I’m not on earth—I’m in some heavenly place.”

“Yes, there’s gold in them fingers.” The Times (London)

“This young pianist, barely into his twenties, has captured wide public attention with the brilliance and energy of his playing.” Washington Post

New York Choral Artists, a professional chorus founded and directed by Joseph Flummerfelt, has been heard with the New York Philharmonic in recent seasons performing repertoire ranging from Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time to Mozart’s Requiem. Among the memorable collaborations with the New York Philharmonic was the concert on September 20, 2001, of Brahms’s A German Requiem, commemorating the events of September 11. The chorus opened the Philharmonic’s 2002–03 subscription season performing the world premiere of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic with Lincoln Center’s Great Performers. Other highlights of include participation in the 1995 New York Philharmonic concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, and a televised performance of the 1986 Statue of Liberty Concert in Central Park. The chorus performed Verdi’s Requiem with the Philharmonic in March 2006, conducted by Lorin Maazel, and in the October 5–6, 2006, and February 2009 Philharmonic concert performances of Ravel’s one-act opera, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, also conducted by Mr. Maazel.

Find additional upcoming performances with New York Choral Artists

Austrian mezzo-soprano Brigitte Pinter made her Teatro alla Scala debut in September 2006 performing the role of Klementia in Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna, a role she had sung in Lisbon in March 2006, and with Riccardo Muti at the Ravenna Festival. She has worked with Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Eliahu Inbal, Franz Welser-Möst, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jürgen Flimm, Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, and numerous others. Her opera appearances include Deutsche Oper Berlin, Zurich Opera, Teatro Sao Carlos Lisbon, Hamburg Staatsoper, Salzburger Festspiele, Vienna Festwochen, the Opera House in Frankfurt, Carnegie Hall, Vienna Musikverein, Philharmonie am Gasteig, and Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. Ms. Pinter’s repertoire includes Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck, several Wagnerian roles, Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio, and the title roles in R. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, and Bizet’s Carmen. She has also performed Mahler’s symphonies and songs; Verdi’s Requiem; and Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Gurrelieder. Ms. Pinter made her stage debut in Schubert’s opera, Fierrabras, at the Vienna Festwochen, with Claudio Abbado (recorded on Deutsche Grammophon). It was Mr. Abbado’s personal recommendation that enabled her to study at The Juilliard School. She was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship from the U.S. and a promotional scholarship from the Vienna Academy of Music. She is making her New York Philharmonic debut in these concerts.

Soprano Tatiana Serjan was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she began her musical studies — piano at the music college, choral conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and vocal performance at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. She completed her education at the Academy for Voice in Torino, Italy, studying with Franca Mattiuci. After winning several vocal competitions, she made her debut as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at the Opera Studio of St. Petersburg in 1994, and also appeared in Puccini’s La bohème and Mozart’s Così fan tutte. She performed Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society. Her Italian debut took place in Torino in 2002, where she sang the role of Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s opera Macbeth, a role she subsequently performed in Athens, Palermo, Tokyo, Ravenna, Madrid, Trieste, and Bologna. She sang in Puccini’s Tosca at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and at Teatro Massimo in Palermo. Ms. Serjan appeared in the title role of Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna, led by Riccardo Muti, at the Ravenna Festival, and has also performed the work at the Teatro National Sao Carlos in Lisbon, and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. She reprises the role in her New York Philharmonic debut with Riccardo Muti.

In the 2006–07 season, American mezzo-soprano Jane Gilbert sings Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with The Cleveland Orchestra and the Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Graf, and returns to The Metropolitan Opera for performances in Jack O’Brien’s new production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica. In recent seasons she has sung Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the St. Louis and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, Handel’s Messiah with the orchestras of Cleveland and Chicago, Mozart’s Requiem with the Houston Symphony, Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater with the National Symphony Orchestra, and Verdi’s Requiem with the National Chorale at Avery Fisher Hall and at the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile. Ms. Gilbert made her debut at The Metropolitan Opera as Grimgerde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, a role she also sang on tour with the company in Japan. Other opera engagements have included the world premieres of Thea Musgrave’s Pontalba with New Orleans Opera and Ede Donath’s Szulamit with Florida Grand Opera. She has performed the title role in Bizet’s Carmen with Central City Opera and Berkshire Opera, and has appeared in several productions at the Canadian Opera Company. She made her European operatic debut with Opéra de Nice as Cuniza in Verdi’s Oberto. She is making her New York Philharmonic debut in these performances.