June 5, 2011

4th July-Oregon Ridge

Jan 27th, Portland, Ore.

Trey Anastasio with the Denver Symphony Orchestra performing “You Enjoy Myself”

Sydney Symphony Orchestra Cond. by José Serebrier 3&4movement youtu.be When José Serebrier was 21 years old, Leopold Stokowski hailed him as “the greatest master of orchestral balance”. After five years as Stokowski’s Associate Conductor at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Serebrier accepted an invitation from George Szell to become the Composer in Residence of the Cleveland Orchestra for Szell’s last two seasons. Szell discovered Serebrier when he won the Ford Foundation American Conductors Competition (together with James Levine). Serebrier was music director of America’s oldest music festival, in Worcester, Massachusetts, until he organized Festival Miami, and served as its artistic director for many years. In that capacity, Serebrier commissioned many composers, including Elliot Carter’s String Quartet No. 4, and conducted many American and world premieres. Serebrier has made international tours with the Juilliard Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Toulouse Chamber Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Spain and others. Serebrier’s first recording, the Ives’ 4th Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, won a Grammy nomination. His recording of the Mendelssohn symphonies won the UK Music Retailers Association Award for Best Orchestral Recording, and his series of Shostakovich’s Film Suites won the Deutsche Schallplatten Award for Best Orchestral Recording. Soundstage magazine selected …

I am not sure what you did when you were 10 or 11 years old… but I definitely was not given the opportunity to conduct an orchestra, especially the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. What an honor!

3/8/2012 @ Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver CO

Antonin Dvořák (1841 – 1904): Symphony 9 In E Minor, Op. 95, “From The New World” / George Szell & Cleveland Orchestra (1958 – 1960) Much of his time in America was occupied by teaching and organizing performances. But above all else Dvorak was a composer and in his first winter in New York he began to write the symphony that would become his most cherished. (It was completed that summer on vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a colony of Czech immigrants who helped assuage Dvorak’s intense homesickness.) Formally, the work fell solidly within European tradition, with a sonata-form opening, a meditative largo broken by restless outbursts, a lusty scherzo with bucolic trios and a vigorous, triumphant finish. In keeping with the emerging trend of cyclical form, its themes all germinated from a common seminal motif and returned in the finale. But beginning with its hugely successful premiere that December, its subtitle “From the New World” generated considerable confusion over its inspiration and thematic content. Resemblance to the atmosphere of Dvorak’s prior work suggested to some commentators that the work was most heavily influenced by nostalgia for his beloved Bohemia. But assuming that Dvorak had set out to practice what he preached, others seized upon the prevalence of the syncopated rhythms, pentatonic scales and flattened sevenths of our native music to find a closer tie to America. They noted Dvorak’s fascination with the Hiawatha legend and traced the symphony’s largo …