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CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER TO NARRATE HENRY V; A
SHAKESPEARE SCENARIO, TO MUSIC FROM SIR WILLIAM WALTON’S
SCORE FOR THE LAURENCE OLIVIER FILM HENRY V.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 8:00 pm
Manhattan School of Music Symphonic Chorus and
Chamber Choir
and
American Boychoir to perform in the Walton work.
The program will open with Overture and Bacchanal
from Wagner’s Tannhauser.
Artists
Christopher Plummer, one of the finest classical actors
today, has spent 60 years in the theater and is a veteran of
well over 100 motion pictures. In his long and
distinguished Broadway career, he has starred in many
prestigious productions, and has also been a leading member
of Britain’s National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare
Company, and Canada’s Stratford Festival. Among his honors
are Tony, Emmy, and major awards in the UK and Canada, in
addition to the National Film Critics’ Award and last year’s
Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Tolstoy in The Last
Station.
Mr. Plummer has written and directed for the stage,
television, and the concert hall, and is the author of a
memoir, In Spite of Myself. He holds an honorary doctor of
fine arts from The Juilliard School,
and in 1986, was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Mr. Plummer played the Henry role in 1956 at the age of 26
at the Canada Stratford Shakespeare Festival. It launched
his career.
” I was Suddenly taken seriously,” he told the
New York Times in 1981. He has performed it several times
since and, as an accomplished pianist, has also branched out
musically to narrate concert versions of Henry V, Peer Gynt,
and Ivan the Terrible.
New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert, The Yoko Nagae Ceschina Chair, began his tenure in September 2009,
creating what New York magazine called “a fresh future for
the Philharmonic.”
The first native New Yorker to hold the post, he has sought
to make the Orchestra a point of civic pride for the city
as
well as for
the country.
Mr. Gilbert’s creative approach to programming combines
works in fresh and innovative ways. He has also forged
artistic partnerships, introducing the positions of The
Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence and The Mary and
James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, an annual three-week
festival, and CONTACT!,
the new-music series.
In 2011–12 he conducts world premieres, three Mahler
symphonies, a residency at London’s Barbican Centre,
and tours to Europe and California, with a season-concluding
musical exploration of space at the Park Avenue Armory,
featuring Stockhausen’s theatrical immersion, Gruppen. Last
season’s highlights included two tours of European capitals,
Carnegie Hall’s 120th Anniversary Concert, and the acclaimed
performance of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, hailed by
the Washington Post as “another victory,”following on
the heels of 2010’s wildly successful staging of Ligeti’s
Le Grand Macabre, which The New York Times called
“an instant Philharmonic
milestone.”
In September 2011 Alan Gilbert becomes Director of
Conducting and Orchestral Studies at The Juilliard School,
where he is also the first to hold the William Schuman Chair
in Musical Studies. Conductor Laureate of the Royal
Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and
Principal Guest Conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony
Orchestra,
he regularly conducts leading orchestras nationally and
internationally, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and
Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Alan Gilbert made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut in
November 2008 leading John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. His
recordings have been nominated for Grammy Awards and
received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone
Magazine. He
studied at Harvard University, The Curtis Institute of
Music, and The Juilliard School, and served as the assistant
conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra (1995–97). In May 2010
Mr. Gilbert received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from
The Curtis Institute of Music.
The department of choral studies at the Manhattan School of
Music, led by Kent Tritle since 2008, has two primary choral
ensembles. The Symphonic Chorus is a large choral ensemble,
made up of first- and second-year undergraduate students,
designed to explore the great choral literature from Baroque
to modern. Past performances have included Orff’s Carmina
burana, Mozart’s Requiem, Bach’s cantata, Jesu,
meine Freude,
Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Resurrection, Brahms’s Ein deutches
Requiem, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Rossini’s
Petit Messe
Sollenelle.
The Chamber Choir is
Manhattan School of Music’s premier small choral ensemble,
comprising advanced undergraduate and graduate students,
which explores a wide variety of choral literature from
every corner of the international choral repertoire.
Recently the Chamber Choir
performed on tour in Washington, D.C., and made its debut at
the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The American Boychoir, under the direction of Litton-Lodal
Music Director Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, is regarded as one of
the United States’s premier concert boys’ choirs and one of
the finest in the world. The American Boychoir is the only
non-sectarian boarding
choir school for boys grades four through eight in the U.S.
that integrates a professional music education with
rigorous academics. The American Boychoir performs and
records regularly with world-class artists and ensembles
such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia
Orchestra, soprano Jessye Norman, pop diva Beyoncé, and Sir
Paul McCartney. The American Boychoir last appeared with the
New York Philharmonic in September 2009 in a performance of
Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, conducted by Music
Director Alan Gilbert.
Repertoire
Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, an adaptation of the
legend of the 13th-century Minnesinger (medieval German
poet-musician) of the same name, completely befuddled the
audience that attended its premiere in 1845. This was partly
due to the new formal
and stylistic ground Wagner was beginning to explore as an
opera composer. For his setting of the legend, Wagner
combined two tales of Tannhäuser: his escape from the
seductive clutches of Venus and subsequent redemption
through religious devotion, and his participation in a
singing contest at Wartburg Castle. The Overture lays out
the opera’s themes of sacred and profane love, introducing
the themes of both the Pilgrim’s Chorus and the Hymn to
Venus. The subsequent Bacchanal, which opens the opera,
depicts the frenzied revelries of Venus and her consort. The
New York Philharmonic first performed the Overture and
Bacchanal in March 1879, when Leopold Damrosch led the New
York Symphony (which later merged with the New York
Philharmonic to form the
present-day New York Philharmonic); most recently it was
performed on tour in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2004, led by
Lorin Maazel.
Sir William Walton (who was knighted by King George VI in
1951) was invited by Laurence Olivier to compose the score
for the 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which
he was producing, directing, and in which he was starring.
They became fast friends, and Walton went on to
provide the scores for Olivier’s subsequent films of
Hamlet and Richard III. Writing about
Henry
V, Olivier stated: “William Walton’s part in the success of
the film was unique. Why he never achieved any Oscars for
this or any of my other Shakespeare films must remain a
prime example of the miasmicly mysterious
conclusions reached by the award-winning organizations.” The
film dramatizes Henry’s military campaign in France in 1415,
showing the king as a skillful soldier and leader who is
able to unite dissident factions in the English army and
defeat the French at
Agincourt. Christopher Palmer’s Henry V: A Shakespeare
Scenario — presented in this performance — is divided into
eight scenes: Prologue, At the Boar’s Head, Embarkation,
Interlude, Harfleur, Agincourt, Interlude — At the French
Court, and Epilogue.
* * *
Credit Suisse is the Global Sponsor of the New York
Philharmonic.
* * *
Programs of the New York Philharmonic are supported, in
part, by public funds from the New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and
the National Endowment for the Arts.
* * *
Tickets for this performance are $35 to $145, and may be
purchased online at
www.nyphil.org
or by calling (212) 875-5656, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.,
Monday through Saturday, and 12:00 noon to 5:00 p.m. on
Sunday.
Tickets may also be purchased at the
Avery Fisher
Hall Box Office or the Alice Tully Hall Box Office
at
Lincoln Center, Broadway at 65th Street. The Box Office
opens at 10:00 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and at noon on
Sunday. On performance evenings, the Box Office closes
one-half hour after
performance time; other evenings it closes at 6:00 p.m. To
determine ticket availability, call the Philharmonic’s
Customer Relations Department 212-875-5656.
(ticket prices subject to change.
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