Featured Artists
Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Hélène Grimaud
Yannick celebrates two toweringly gifted composers, seminal American voices of the 20th century. Gershwin’s Piano Concerto dances through cityscapes, brash and brilliant. Bernstein, whose works for the concert hall, opera stage, Broadway, and film formed the soundtrack of the century, is represented by two of his Broadway masterworks, Candide and West Side Story, and his impassioned “Jeremiah” Symphony, an epic chronicle of a prophet and a people.
The Orchestra’s 125th birthday celebration ends with a party! George Gershwin threw open the doors of the classical concert hall with his Concerto in F, seasoning the traditional form of the concerto with a belt of the blues and a jigger of jazz-age gin. It’s performed here by Hélène Grimaud, a pianist whose performances with Yannick and the Orchestra display a uniquely attuned relationship, as though they had performed together forever.
The party starts with Leonard Bernstein’s frothy, fabulous Overture to his wondrously witty Candide, a heart-starter that never fails to thrill—and ends in vivid music from his biggest Broadway hit, West Side Story.
In between we hear a Bernstein masterpiece less often performed: his Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”). Inspired by the story of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and the fall of Israel to the Babylonians in 587BCE, the Symphony references sacred texts and chants, with a mezzo-soprano part based on excerpts from the book of Lamentations in the Bible. Written when Bernstein was just 24, it received its premiere in 1944 and quickly became the talk of the music world; performances in Boston, New York, St Louis, Detroit, Prague, and Jerusalem, along with a broadcast on 70 radio stations across the country, sealed the reputation of this young composer. The New York Music Critics Circle voted it the outstanding new classical work of the season.
Program
Bernstein
Overture to Candide (June 6 only)
Gershwin
Piano Concerto in F
Bernstein
Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”) (June 4, 5, and 7 only)
Bernstein
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story