Venue: Overture Hall
Friday, November 17, 2023
7:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 18, 2023
8:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
2:30 p.m.
Get the best seats before single tickets go on sale Saturday, August 19, 2023. New subscribers save up to 50%!
November brings two great staples of the symphonic repertoire, Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony in our first performances in over twenty years, and another all-time favorite of mine, Schumann’s Piano Concerto. I am so looking forward to welcoming back the brilliant pianist Jonathan Biss who has a special affinity for this concerto. It is also with great excitement that we will perform William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony for the first time. This work, which was greeted with great acclaim when it premiered under the baton of Leopold Stokowski in 1934, was all but forgotten until recently, and has been heralded as a masterpiece. Using Negro folk melodies and spirituals as its thematic source, the work is colorfully orchestrated and an absolute delight to listen to. I wanted to perform this work with the orchestra the minute I first heard it and so look forward to sharing it with you. – John DeMain, Music Director
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D Major, K. 385 “Haffner”
Robert Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54
Intermission
William Levi Dawson, Negro Folk Symphony
Program Notes will be available in August 2023.
John DeMain, Music Director
Jonathan Biss, Piano
Prelude Discussion
Enjoy a 30-minute talk starting one hour before each concert in Overture Hall. Free to ticketholders.
Particularly notable was the imaginative breadth of Biss’s sonic palette, his way of deploying color not merely as a decorative effect but as a narrative and expressive device within the work’s classical frame.
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
Ronald J. and Janet E. Johnson
Prairie Trust
Jonathan Biss is a world renowned pianist who channels his deep musical curiosity into performances and projects in the concert hall and beyond. In addition to performing with today’s leading orchestras, he continues to expand his reputation as a teacher, musical thinker, and one of the great Beethoven interpreters of our time. He is Co-Artistic Director alongside Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent fifteen summers. He also recently led a massive open online course (MOOC) via Coursera, reaching an international audience of over 150,000. Biss writes extensively on his repertoire and has authored four audio- and e-books, including UNQUIET: My Life with Beethoven (2020), the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of 2020.
Throughout his career, Biss has advocated for new music. This year he continues his ongoing Beethoven/5 commissioning project, in association with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, that pairs each Beethoven concerto with a new concerto composed in response. This season, he performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 paired with a piano concerto inspired by that work: Brett Dean’s Gneixendorfer Musik– Eine Winterreise in its U.S. premiere with the SPCO, as well as both concertos with the Melbourne Symphony. Biss has performed the Dean and fifth Beethoven concertos together in concerts with the Dresden Philharmonic, NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed the Dean concerto separately with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Among the earlier Beethoven/5 commissions are Caroline Shaw’s Watermark, inspired by Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3; Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music) inspired by the second piano concerto; Sally Beamish’s City Stanzas paired with Beethoven’s first piano concerto, and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il Sogno di Stradella paired with the fourth. Prior to the Beethoven/5, project Biss commissioned Lunaire Variations by David Ludwig, Interlude II by Leon Kirchner, Wonderer by Lewis Spratlan, and Three Pieces for Piano and a concerto by Bernard Rands, which he premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has also premiered a piano quintet by William Bolcom.
Biss’s endeavors represent his complete approach to music-making, and desire to imbue audiences with his own passion for music. Previous projects included an exploration of composers’ “Late Style” in various concert programs at Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Centre, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and San Francisco Performances. He also gave master classes at Carnegie Hall and published the Kindle Single Coda on the topic. His previous Kindle Singles also include Beethoven’s Shadow, and A Pianist Under the Influence, the latter of which coincided with his project Schumann: Under the Influence, a 30-concert exploration of the composer’s role in musical history, and recording of Schumann and Dvořák piano quintets with the Elias String Quartet.
Biss has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Leonard Bernstein Award presented at the 2005 Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Wolf Trap’s Shouse Debut Artist Award, the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the 2003 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and a 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award. His albums for EMI won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and Edison awards. He was an artist-in-residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today and was the first American chosen to participate in the BBC’s New Generation Artist program. He is also on the piano faculty of the New England Conservatory