New Music for Orchestra Dec. 11 features music by David Lang
The Yale School of Music presents a concert of new music for orchestra, performed by the Yale Philharmonia under the direction of Shinik Hahm, on Friday, December 11 at 8 pm in Woolsey Hall. The concert highlights two works by David Lang: International Business Machine and Grind to a Halt.
International Business Machine, subtitled “an overture for Tanglewood,” was written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Boston Globe called the piece “a brisk, elegantly-fashioned work depicting today’s post-industrial computer age.” Grind to a Halt is dedicated to the memory of Jacob Druckman, Lang’s composition teacher and a longtime member of the Yale School of Music faculty. According to Lang, “One of the things that interests me very much is how certain mechanical musical tasks force players – and listeners – into a kind of concentration that can be spellbinding. The intense concentration necessary to coordinate the ensemble in Grind to a Halt is a kind of virtuosity in itself.”
Lang, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music, has said: “The world needs happy tunes. But for me, the interesting ideas are where those happy tunes aren’t. The interesting things are in the dark places, or in the ugliness, or in the noise or the grit.” (more…)
Members of the Berlin Philharmonic to work with YSM students
Klaus Wallendorf, horn
The Yale School of Music is pleased to announce a special Philharmonia session with members of the Berlin Philharmonic on Tuesday, November 10 at 2:30 pm. Nine members of the Berlin Philharmonic will travel to Yale to lead the Philharmonia in sectional coachings, followed by a side-by-side reading of the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor.
School of Music students who are not participating are invited to observe the reading session, which will take place in the Glee Club Room from 4:00 to 5:15 pm. (more…)
Yale Philharmonia to perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 4
Concert opens with Brahms, including the Variations on a Theme of Haydn
Music director Shinik Hahm will lead the Yale Philharmonia in a program of Brahms and Mahler on Friday, October 23 at 8 pm. The free concert will take place in historic Woolsey Hall, where nearly 100 years ago (in February of 1910) Mahler himself conducted the illustrious New York Philharmonic in a concert of music ranging from Bach to Berlioz. Mahler will be represented by his Symphony No. 4. The last movement of this popular work will feature the Korean soprano Jihee Kim, a young artist in the Yale Opera program. Two well-known pieces by Johannes Brahms comprise the first half of the concert: the Academic Festival Overture and Variations on a Theme of Haydn. (more…)
Season Finale: Yale Philharmonia plays Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Ravel
In its final concert of the season, the Yale Philharmonia will perform three colorful and popular works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on Friday, May 1 at 8 pm in Woolsey Hall. Conducting fellow Julian Pellicano will lead the orchestra in Richard Strauss’s rollicking Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, a tone poem from 1907. Then the orchestra’s music director, Shinik Hahm, will take the podium for the rest of the evening. Under his direction, Latvian pianist Reinis Zarins, a winner of the 2008 Woolsey Hall Concerto Competition, will perform the solo in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. The evening culminates in Rachmaninoff’s monumental Symphony No. 2 in E minor.
Yale Philharmonia to play Mahler’s epic Fifth Symphony
The Yale School of Music presents the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale in a spectacular program of Mahler, Britten, and Saint-Saëns in Woolsey Hall at 8:00 pm on Saturday, April 4, 2009.
The great conductor Herbert von Karajan said once that when you hear Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, “you forget that time has passed. A great performance of the Fifth is a transforming experience. The fantastic finale almost forces you to hold your breath.” The Philharmonia, under the direction of Shinik Hahm, performs this riveting work in the resonant, historic space of Woolsey Hall.
After the symphony, which was written in 1901-02, the program continues into the twentieth century with Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes. Written during World War II, shortly after the composer’s return to his native Britain, the evocative Interludes will be conducted by Farkhad Khudiyev. The program will conclude with Saint-Saëns’ youthful, energetic Cello Concerto, a work that the Philharmonia performed with great success on its tour of Asia last July. In this performance, the soloist will be Ashley Bathgate, a winner of the 2008 Woolsey Hall Concerto Competition.
Admission to the concert is free. For more information, visit the Yale School of Music website, music.yale.edu, or call 203 432-4158.
Nicholas McGegan: “Celebration of Four Masters”
Nicholas McGegan, acclaimed by The New Yorker as “an expert in eighteenth-century style,” will conduct choral and orchestral works of Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, and George Frideric Handel on Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 4 pm in Woolsey Hall. The concert is a “Celebration of Four Masters”— a reference to McGegan and the three featured composers — and coincides with the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death and the 200th anniversary of both Mendelssohn’s birth and Haydn’s death. McGegan will conduct the Yale Philharmonia (Shinik Hahm, director) and Yale Collegium Players (Robert Mealy, director) in Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 “Drum Roll,” and a selection of works for chorus and orchestra: Haydn’s Te Deum in C and Der Sturm with the Yale Camerata (Marguerite Brooks, conductor); Mendelssohn’s Verleih uns Frieden and Hear My Prayer with the Yale Glee Club (Jeffrey Douma, director); Haydn’s Salve Regina with the Yale Voxtet (James Taylor, director); and Handel’s As Pants the Hart and Te Deum in A with the Yale Schola Cantorum (Simon Carrington, director). The program concludes with the combined choruses and instrumentalists in Handel’s “Hallelujah” Chorus from Messiah.
The concert is a presentation of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale School of Music, and the Yale Glee Club. Admission is free. For more information, visit music.yale.edu, www.yale.edu/ism, or call 203-432-4158.
Acclaimed by the Glasgow Herald as “a wizard who can make music soar in apparent defiance of gravity,” Nicholas McGegan has been the Music Director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) for more than twenty years and since 1991 the Artistic Director of Germany’s International Handel-Festival at Gottingen. Mr. McGegan is an active recording artist, with an extensive discography with the PBO and other performing groups, including the Gottingen Festival Opera and Orchestra and the Arcadian Academy. Mr. McGegan’s world-premiere recording of Handel’s Susanna earned a Gramophone Award. His most recent recordings include music by Handel and Mendelssohn for Carus, Romanza, featuring works of Hummel, Lachner and Weber, and Handel’s Atalanta and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, both with PBO. Born in England and educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, Mr. McGegan has an honorary degree from London’s Royal College of Music and was elected an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2006.
