Composed in 2007.
Premiered on November 30, 2007 in Palo Alto, California, conducted by Alan Pierson.

John Adams is one of today's most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland's career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the American Symphony Orchestra League found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he received the University of Louisville's distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic's Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named "Composer of the Year" by Musical America Magazine; he has been made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York's Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled "John Adams: An American Master," the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences "for contributions to society" and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he has been granted an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in England, an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Son of Chamber Symphony was commissioned by Stanford University, Carnegie Hall and the San Francisco Ballet. It was premiered in concert on November 30, 2007 by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound at Stanford University, conducted by Alan Pierson; the choreographed version (titled Joyride) by Mark Morris was first performed by San Francisco Ballet on April 23, 2008. Adams wrote, "Son of Chamber Symphony, composed in 2007, bears an unmistakable family resemblance to its predecessor, the 1992 Chamber Symphony: both are written for an ensemble of roughly fifteen solo instruments; both are cast in a three-movement, fast–slow–fast form; and both share a highly animated, in-your-face kind of cheeky buoyancy. This might strike one as surprising, given the lineage of the 'chamber symphony' as a musical form, the begetter of which was the fearsomely serious Arnold Schoenberg.

"What is a 'chamber symphony,' anyway? Judging from the two that Schoenberg composed, it is a piece of symphonic scale written for a large group of virtuoso soloists. In live performance, the 'chamber symphony' provides all sorts of challenges, not only to the performer but also to the listener. Balances are always in danger of going seriously out of whack. Individual string instruments can easily be buried by an overly loud clarinet or, in my case, an enthusiastic drummer. But when acoustical issues have been sorted out, the combined sound of a dozen or more skilled soloists can afford a musical experience that combines the intimacy of chamber music with the breadth and scale of a full orchestra.

"What drew me to the Austrian composer's eponymous Op. 9 Chamber Symphony of 1906 were its explosive energy and the staggering, acrobatic virtuosity of its instrumental writing. Schoenberg's bounding, fast moving themes weren't so much 'stated' as they were launched like some dare-devil circus performer shot out of a canon. The hyper-lyricism of its melodies sounded as if all of Tristan had been compressed into a tiny plutonium sphere, just one neutron short of going super-critical.

"Well, OK, perhaps my metaphors need to be reeled in, but there is no mistaking the attraction of this format to a composer like me who normally operates on the large canvas of orchestral and operatic forms. Where my two chamber symphonies differ from Schoenberg's is in the addition of brass, percussion and electronic keyboards. The 1992 Chamber Symphony features a drummer on a trap set and a synthesizer. The Son includes a celesta, a set of orchestral chimes and, in the first movement, a keyboard sampler playing samples I made of a prepared piano, the 'boing' of which sets the tone for the first movement.

"I knew that Son of Chamber Symphony would be turned into a ballet by Mark Morris, the genius choreographer who twenty years earlier had created the dance for [the operas] Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Knowing that Mark is one of the few choreographers since Balanchine whose choreography mirrors the formal and metric structure of the music, I thought long and hard about how to design the musical structure. In truth I didn't have visual images in my head while composing — I rarely do — but I was nonetheless surprised when Joyride, the title of the Morris ballet, turned out to be one of his most severely abstract creations. Mark largely passed over the humor and occasional wackiness of the piece in favor of a geometrically complex, constantly morphing interplay of eight dancers, all dressed in tight, Spandex body suits, each sporting on his or her chest an LED digital readout of random numbers.

The first movement begins with a dropping octave 'dactyl' rhythm (long–short–short), a musical idea so basic that it ought not to be 'owned' by anyone, but, alas, it is — by the composer of the Ninth Symphony [i.e., Beethoven, in the scherzo movement]. Other instruments join in, confounding the perception of pulse until the activity reaches a cadential moment that leads into the first tutti, a boisterous unison melody for high instruments accompanied by jabs and pecks from brass and percussion. From here the music thins out, passing through a sequence of sudden stops and starts, the unexpected nature of which was cleverly incorporated into the choreography of Morris' Joyride. With its driving pulse, bouncing motives and spiky, bright-edged surfaces, the opening movement bears the closest resemblance to the earlier 1992 Chamber Symphony.

"The second movement contrasts the preceding hectic virtuosity with a long, lyrical cantilena for flute and clarinet sung over a quietly strumming continuum in celesta and pizzicato strings. This 'endless' melody is followed by a different but equally lyrical one played by the solo violin and cello, voiced three octaves apart, accompanied by a gently modulated tapestry of trills and shakes in the winds and percussion. The opening cantilena melody returns, but this time it appears in a parody version, with staccato barbs interrupting and mocking it. This interrupting material finally takes center stage, highlighted by an absurd dotted figure (in prosody, a 'trochee') that manically hops and skips while the opening melody struggles to make do, as if coping with a rude, uninvited dancing partner.

"I toyed with calling the finale 'Can-Can,' but at the last moment my better judgment took hold. The Wikipedia, unimpeachable source of all my higher learning, describes the can-can as a 'high-energy and physically demanding music hall dance, traditionally performed by a chorus line of female dancers featuring high kicking and suggestive, provocative body movements.' But I decided against using the title because I could not accurately distinguish it from the description of a 'galop,' to which, so suggests Wikipedia, the can-can is related, but in a degraded, decidedly downscale version.

"Those listeners familiar with Nixon in China will remark another family resemblance here — this time with the News aria sung by the President at the beginning of Act I. For a brief time, the third movement is a kind of snarky gloss on that aria, but it soon departs from the script, taking along only the driving, quarter-note patter of the bass line as it ventures into new terrain with passages that include a short parody of the opening of [Adams' 1984 orchestral work] Harmonielehre (is nothing sacred?) and a final ride-out that features a delicately pulsing trash-can lid."

Composed in 1967.
Premiered on September 13, 1967 in Moscow, conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky with David Oistrakh as soloist.

Though Shostakovich suffered a chronic loss of health following his first heart attack, in May 1966, he was determined and productive for the remaining nine years of his life, composing the Fourteenth and Fifteen Symphonies, the Second Violin Concerto, vocal settings of texts by Michelangelo and Alexander Blok, a sizable number of smaller pieces and the last five of his fifteen string quartets. In their biography of the composer, Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky described Shostakovich as they observed him at his country dacha in Repino at that time: "We would encounter him moving slowly along the paths and avenues. He made a surprising impression on us at that time. Elderly and suffering from numerous illnesses, he seemed intensely concentrated upon something known only to himself. It seemed as if he carried within him music which he alone could hear, and that this was why he walked so slowly and cautiously, as if afraid it would evaporate before he grasped it.... Only later did we learn that he had been aware of his approaching end, and that he was indeed in a hurry to express everything within himself that required utterance. All things a person usually takes for granted were difficult for him: going to the dining room, walking up steps, shaking hands, sitting down, standing up.... Even so, he continued to meet colleagues, to listen to their music and to talk. But for the most part he worked. Illuminated by a table lamp, the silhouette of the composer bent over his writing table could be seen in the window of the little chalet in the morning, the afternoon, and late in the evening."

The specter of mortality hovers over every work that Shostakovich wrote during his last, sickly decade, but he was too skilled a musical craftsman and too eloquent a spokesman about the human condition to allow all of his creative thoughts to run along the same channel. The Second Violin Concerto, written in 1967 for David Oistrakh (as the Concerto No. 1 had been two decades before), is among the compositions of Shostakovich's last years that balance brooding tragedy with less weighty emotions. "There are [in the Concerto No. 2] disconcerting shifts between an almost despairing sadness of lyrical expression, child-like innocence and a frenetic, grotesque sense of humor," wrote British musicologist Eric Roseberry. "Strangely suppressed motivic repetitions occur with disturbing frequency, as do painful outbursts of solo recitative. This music comes near to speech, yet it gives away nothing." The opening movement unfolds along conventional sonata-form lines, with a plaintive main theme of cramped, chromatic intervals and a playful mock-march as the second subject. The expressive arch of the movement begins and ends quietly, questioningly, reserving its most forceful moments for the expansive central development section. The Adagio, lean and enigmatic, a musical speech common to many of Shostakovich's late works, is an introspective cantilena for the soloist, often mournful, sometimes nostalgically bittersweet, usually wound through another single melodic thread from the orchestra. A few bold gestures from the violin lead directly to the finale, a rousing, sardonic rondo that culminates in a fiery solo cadenza. A brazen and energetic coda closes the Concerto.

Composed in 1811-1812.
Premiered on February 27, 1814 in Vienna, conducted by the composer.

In early October 1812, the Linzer Musikzeitung carried the following announcement: "We have had the long-wished-for pleasure of having in our metropolis for several days the Orpheus and greatest musical poet of our time...." This "Orpheus" was Beethoven, and he had descended on Linz as the last stop in a summer spent taking the waters at Karlsbad, Franzensbrunn and Töplitz in an attempt to relieve various physical ailments. His interest in Linz, however, extended beyond the mineral baths into the private life of his younger brother, Johann. It seems that Johann had acquired a housekeeper, one Therese Obermeyer, and that her duties extended to, as the composer's biographer Thayer put it, "something more." Perhaps as much from jealousy as from moral indignation, the bachelor Beethoven did not approve of either the situation or this particular female (he later dubbed her "Queen of the Night"), and he took it upon himself, Thayer continued, "to meddle in the private concerns of his brother, which he had no more right to do than any stranger." He stirred up a terrific row over this matter, and, after taking his concern to the local authorities, actually was awarded a decision to have Therese thrown out of town. Johann had had about enough by this time, and the upshot of all of Ludwig's intrusions was that his younger brother married the housekeeper after all.

Beethoven had been installed in an attractive room in Johann's house overlooking the Danube and the surrounding countryside upon his arrival, and he worked on the Eighth Symphony throughout all this unnecessary domestic kerfuffle. Not the slightest hint of the turmoil crept into the music, however. It is actually the most humorous and "unbuttoned," in the composer's own description, of all his symphonies. At that time in his life (he was 42), Beethoven was immensely fond of a certain rough fun and practical jokes, and the 19th-century English music scholar Sir George Grove believed that "the Eighth Symphony, perhaps more than any other of the nine, is a portrait of the author in his daily life, in his habit as he lived; the more it is studied and heard, the more will he be found there in his most natural and characteristic personality." Certainly this work presents a different view of Beethoven than do its immediate neighbors, and it is this very contrast that helps to bring the man and his creations more fully into focus.

The compact sonata form of the opening movement begins without preamble. The opening theme (F major), dance-like if a bit heavy-footed, appears immediately in vigorous triple meter. The second theme, built on short sequentially rising figures, enters in the surprising tonality of D major, but quickly rights itself into the expected key of C major. The closing group consists of a strong two-beat figure alternating with a swaying, legato line for the woodwinds. The development is concerned with a quick, octave-skip motive and a rather stormy treatment of the main theme. This central section ends with one of the longest passages of sustained fortissimo in the entire Classical literature to herald the recapitulation with a great wave of sound. The long coda comes close to being a second development section in its mood and thematic manipulation. The second movement is a sonatina — a sonata form without a development section — based on a ticking theme in the woodwinds (actually an imitation of the metronome recently invented by Beethoven's friend Johann Nepomuk Mälzel) and an impeccable music-box melody presented by the violins. The third movement abandons the scherzo of Beethoven's other symphonies and returns to the archaic dance form of the minuet; its central trio features horns and clarinets over an arpeggiated accompaniment in the cellos. The length of the finale almost equals that of the preceding three movements combined, and it carries significant importance in the work's total structure because of the diminutive size of the internal movements. In mood it is joyous, almost boisterous; in form, it is sonata-allegro, with enough repetitions of the main theme thrown in to bring it close to a rondo. The extensive coda actually occupies more time than the development, and maintains the Symphony's bustling energy and high spirits to the end.

Vadim Gluzman’s extraordinary artistry both sustains the great violinistic tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries and enlivens it with the dynamism of today. The Israeli violinist appears regularly with major orchestras such as: in North America, the Chicago Symphony, San Francisco, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; in Europe, the London Philharmonic, London Symphony, BBC Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Munich, Dresden and Czech Philharmonic Orchestras, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and Finnish Radio Symphony; in Israel, the Israel Philharmonic and Jerusalem Symphony, and in Asia, the NHK and KBS Orchestras.

His collaborators among the world’s foremost conductors include Neeme Järvi, Andrew Litton, Marek Janowski, Itzhak Perlman, Paavo Järvi, Kristjan Järvi, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Hannu Lintu, Kazushi Ono, Peter Oundjian, Vassili Sinaisky, Tugan Sokhiev and Michail Jurowski. Numbering among his festival appearances are Verbier, Ravinia, Lockenhaus, Pablo Casals, Colmar, Jerusalem, Schwetzinger Festspiele, Festival de Radio France and, in summer 2011, the North Shore Chamber Music Festival in Northbrook Illinois, which Gluzman founded in 2010 with his wife and long-standing recital partner, pianist Angela Yoffe.

Beyond interpreting established or rediscovered works, Vadim Gluzman is a passionate advocate of new music and has collaborated with a number of today’s foremost composers, such as Arvo Pärt, Peteris Vasks, Lera Auerbach, Giya Kancheli, Michael Daugherty, Sofia Gubaidulina, Menachem Wiesenberg, and Richard Rodney Bennett, premiering their works in concert and in recordings. In 2010-11 he gave the UK premiere of Michael Daugherty’s Fire and Blood with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kristjan Järvi, and his latest CD release (Autumn 2011) under his exclusive contract with BIS Records is Gubaidulina’s in tempus praesens with the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester under Jonathan Nott. His Spring 2011 release of works by Max Bruch, including the much-loved Violin Concerto No 1, prompted reviewers to draw comparisons with such Golden Age players as Kreisler and Oistrakh; in France it was honoured with the Diapason d’Or and the Choc de Classica, while in the UK it was named Editor’s Choice by Classic FM Magazine and Orchestral Choice by the BBC Music Magazine. This crowns and continues the acclaim for Gluzman’s recorded catalogue, which includes works by Barber, Bernstein, Bloch, Dvarionas, Glazunov, Korngold, Pärt, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky and a collection of virtuoso showpieces, Fireworks, with Angela Yoffe at the piano.

Gluzman’s 2011/12 season, which begins with a return to the London Philharmonic, brings appearances in Germany with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Dresden Philharmonic, a tour with the Schleswig-Holstein Orchestra, and performances with the Baltic Youth Philharmonic at the Dresden Music Festival and Schumannfest Düsseldorf. His European dates also include the BBC Symphony Orchestra (UK premiere of Dvarionas’ Violin Concerto under Neeme Järvi), Bergen Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Brno Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic and Orquesta Sinfónica RTVE Madrid. In the US he appears with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, the Minnesota Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic, IRIS Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra and in several recitals with Angela Yoffe. Mr. Gluzman also continues his special relationship with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico, performing Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 2 with Carlos Miguel Prieto.

Vadim Gluzman’s future plans include performances with pianists Angela Yoffe, Lera Auerbach and cellist Ani Aznavoorian to celebrate John Neumeier’s 40th anniversary at the Hamburg Ballet, his debut with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and a European tour with the Riga Sinfonietta.

Vadim Gluzman was born in 1973 in the Ukraine and began studying the violin at the age of seven. Before moving in 1990 to Israel, where he was a student of Yair Kless, he studied with Roman Sne in Latvia and Zakhar Bron in Russia. In the US his teachers were Arkady Fomin and, at the Juilliard School, the late Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki. Early in his career, Mr. Gluzman enjoyed the encouragement and support of Isaac Stern, and in 1994 he received the prestigious Henryk Szeryng Foundation Career Award.

Vadim Gluzman plays the 1690 ‘ex-Leopold Auer’ Stradivari, on extended loan to him through the generosity of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern’s direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern’s fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled “Britten’s Orchestra” was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany’s Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra’s history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell’s works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the “Universe” Symphony and their first recording of the “Emerson” piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, “The Grammar of Conducting,” Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf ’s collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.

Composed in 1817.
Premiered on January 25, 1817 in Rome.

The story of Cinderella is most familiar in Charles Perrault's classic retelling of 1697, which is filled with elements of magic and fantasy. The tale served as the basis for operas by Charles-Guillaume Étienne (libretto) and Niccolò Isouard (music) in 1810 (Cendrillon, premiered in Paris), and Felice Romani and Stefano Pavesi (Agatina, Milan) in 1814. Rossini may well have heard this latter effort during his residence in Milan while preparing for the premiere of Il Turco in Italia. Ferretti (the author of over sixty libretti despite his full-time position as administrator of the tobacco monopoly for the Papal States) cobbled his verses from all of these sources, but excised the more romantic components to make the plot suitable to Rossini's rationalistic buffa style. David Ewen summarized the story as realized in La Cenerentola: "The fairy godmother becomes Alidoro, a practical philosopher employed by the Prince, who, disguised as a beggar, receives help from Cinderella after having been rudely turned down by her stepsisters. Though the father of these two girls plans to have one of them marry the Prince, Alidoro contrives to have Cinderella become the fortunate bride." The Overture to La Cenerentola, though originally conceived for La Gazzetta (a frothy comedy about a father who advertises in a newspaper for a husband for his flirtatious daughter), captures perfectly the sparkling charm of the opera. An introductory episode in slow tempo opens the Overture with motives which contrast lyricism and drama. The main theme, introduced by the violins in quicker meter after a held chord and a pause, is a tripping melody of vivacious character. A blustery transition leads to the subsidiary subject, an ingratiating strain first entrusted to the clarinet. The characteristic "Rossini crescendo" (heard again in the opera to close Act I) is capped by some full cadential harmonies and a few quiet pizzicato gestures from the strings before the themes are recapitulated for formal balance and unalloyed delectation.

Composed in 1918-1919.
Premiered on October 27, 1919 in London, conducted by the composer with Felix Salmond as soloist.

It is not impossible that the First World War was the most traumatic event in the history of Western civilization. Wars, intrigues, religious upheavals, disasters of every ilk had regularly wreaked havoc upon Europe from the beginnings of recorded history, many reshaping political boundaries, changing ruling houses, or even redirecting basic philosophies. Nothing previous to The Great War, however, so profoundly altered the assumptions on which our civilization is founded. Between 1914 and 1918, three royal lines — Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov — lost their thousand-year birthrights; the awesome destructiveness of modern technological warfare became stunningly apparent; social repression of ancient ancestry sought redress. World War I shaped not only political boundaries; it shaped our modern world. It taught us not about the fragility of human life (our most primitive Cro-Magnon ancestor who chiseled the first spear-point knew that), but about the fragility of our institutions, our culture, our civilized order — about the razor's-edge balance on which they rest. When added to these profound concerns, the personal grief of death, deprivation and destruction left no one in the West untouched. Edward Elgar was no exception.

It seemed that Elgar's world was crumbling in 1918. The four years of war had left him, as so many others, weary and numb from the crush of events. Many of his friends of German ancestry were put through a bad time in England during those years; others whom he knew were killed or maimed in action. The traditional foundations of the British political system were skewed by the rise of socialism directly after the war, and Elgar saw his beloved Edwardian world drawing to a close. (He resembles another titan among fin-de-siècle musicians, Gustav Mahler, in his mourning of a passing age.) His music seemed anachronistic in an era of polychords and dodecaphony, a remnant of stuffy conservatism, and his 70th birthday concert in Queen's Hall attracted only half a house. The health of his wife, his chief helpmate, inspiration and critic, began to fail, and with her passing in 1920, Elgar virtually stopped composing. His friends drifted away. He became a lonely old man, given to flinging about caustic remarks, even concerning his own music. At a rehearsal of the Cello Concerto in 1923, he turned to Ralph Vaughan Williams and said, "I am surprised that you came to hear this vulgar music." The Cello Concerto, written just before his wife's death, is Elgar's last major work, and seems both to summarize his disillusion over the calamities of World War I and to presage the gnawing unhappiness of his last years. Wrote Harold Schonberg, "In the elegiac Cello Concerto it is hard to escape the notion that Elgar — consciously or otherwise — was making a final statement, retreating into a private world from which he was never to emerge." The adjectives "mellow," "autumnal," "resigned," "meditative" all attach themselves appropriately to this introspective Concerto, which Elgar said mirrors "a man's attitude to life."

Large sections of the Concerto are given over to the solitary ruminations of the cello in the form of recitative-like passages, such as the one that opens the work. The forms of the Concerto's four movements only suggest traditional models in their epigrammatic concentration. The first movement is a ternary structure (A–B–A), commencing after the opening recitative. A limpid, undulating theme in 9/8 (Moderato) is given by the lower strings as the material for the first and third sections, while a related melody (12/8, with dotted rhythms) appears first in the woodwinds in the central portion. Elgar's biographer Michael Kennedy wrote of the poignant mood of this movement, "This is overpoweringly the music of wood smoke and autumn bonfires, of the evening of life." The first movement is linked directly to the second (Allegro molto). It takes several tries before the music of the second movement is able to maintain its forward motion, but when it does, it proves to be a skittering, moto perpetuo display piece for the soloist, Elgar's closest approach to overt virtuosity in this work. It is music, however, which, for all its hectic activity, seems strangely earth-bound, a sort of wild merriment not quite capable of banishing the dolorous thoughts of the opening movement. The almost-motionless stillness of the following Adagio returns to the introspection of the opening movement. It, in the words of Herbert Byard, "seems to express the grief that is too deep for tears." Its calm resignation lays open a window into the soul of the composer that was usually well-shuttered by the vigor and complexity of much of his other music.

The finale, like the opening, is prefaced by a recitative for the soloist. The movement's form following this introductory section is based on the Classical rondo, and makes a valiant attempt at the "hail-and-well-met" vigor of Elgar's earlier march music. Like the scherzando second movement, however, it seems more a nostalgic recollection of past abilities than a potent display of remaining powers. Toward the end, the stillness of the third movement creeps over the music, and the soloist indulges in an extended soliloquy. Brief bits of earlier movements are remembered before a final recall of the fast rondo music closes this thoughtful Concerto.

Michael Kennedy wrote of this work, "Here is the elegy for an age. The slaughter of war ... had grieved Elgar, but this requiem is not a cosmic utterance on behalf of mankind, it is wholly personal, the musical expression of his bitterness about the providence that was ... cruelly obtuse to individual sorrow and sacrifice. There is no massive hope for the future in this music, only the voice of an aging, embittered man, a valediction to an era and to the powers of music that he knew were dying with him." This is music that our own disordered age might do well to experience with a receptive heart.

Composed in 1872-1873; revised in 1879-1880.
Premiered on February 7, 1873 in Moscow, conducted by Nicholas Rubinstein.

Looking back through the mists of well over a century to the closing decades of Imperial Russia, it might at first seem that an unwavering unanimity joined together the music from Glinka through Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky to Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. Upon closer examination of the lives and philosophies of these men, however, bitter enmities are revealed. The group of musical nationalists known in the West as "The Five" — Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov — were all amateur musicians determined to establish a distinctly Russian school of composition based upon native folk and church music, history and lore. In this, they followed the lead of Mikhail Glinka, revered as the father of Russian concert music. They belligerently defended their untutored status on the basis that their lack of formal training freed them from German musical hegemony, and allowed them to penetrate more directly into the heart of the Russian ethos. They looked upon the Russian graduates of the leading conservatories almost as traitors to the nationalistic cause they espoused, and Tchaikovsky was among their especially favored targets. For his part, the well-trained Tchaikovsky could hardly help but look down on the rough-hewn music of The Five. He once castigated Mussorgsky's work in a letter to his brother Modeste as "the lowest, commonest parody of music; it may go to the devil for all I care."

Still, there was inevitably frequent contact between these two factions, and eventually a laissez-faire understanding was achieved. Rimsky-Korsakov decided to forsake the ranks of the uneducated, and taught himself the techniques of music well enough to eventually become Russia's most respected pedagogue, numbering Stravinsky and Respighi among his students. Tchaikovsky, though critical of their lack of professionalism, always respected the raw talent of the little group of nationalists, and he even agreed with their ideal of fostering Russian music. Like them, he felt drawn to the native traditions of his homeland, and once wrote to his benefactress, Mme von Meck, "As regards the Russian element in general in my music (i.e., the instances of melody and harmony originating in folksong), I grew up in the backwoods, saturating myself from earliest childhood with the inexplicable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian folksong." Unlike The Five, however, who felt that a free fantasia form could best express their ideas, Tchaikovsky believed that the Russian influence should be channeled into the traditional, Classical form of the symphony. It is not hard to understand, therefore, why Tchaikovsky was the first Russian composer widely appreciated in the Western world, whose tastes had so long been dominated by German music.

Despite their underlying differences, there were at least two significant instances in Tchaikovsky's early life when he was musically drawn to The Five. One was when Balakirev suggested the topic and even the structure for his 1869 tone poem, Romeo and Juliet. Another was in this Second Symphony. After an exhausting year of teaching, composing and writing music criticism in Moscow, Tchaikovsky visited his beloved sister, Alexandra, in Kamenka in Ukraine in June 1872. He was refreshed during the summer months not only by the time spent with his family, but also by the chance to return to the country and its people. Among the things that he enjoyed most was hearing the peasants sing, and it may have been this rustic music that inspired the Second Symphony, just as it did many of the works of The Five. It was Tchaikovsky's use in this Symphony of three folk tunes that he may have heard in Kamenka that caused the work to be nicknamed "Little Russian" by the critic Nikolai Kashkin in 1896. The diminutive referred not to any characteristic of the work but rather to the Ukrainian region from which Tchaikovsky borrowed his themes, known in Tsarist days as "Little Russia."

The Symphony's first movement is prefaced by a slow introduction based on a variant of the traditional Russian song Down by Mother Volga. The plaintive theme is first intoned by the solo horn before it is given a lengthy consideration by the rest of the orchestra. The body of the movement's sonata form begins with a quickening of the tempo and the presentation of the main theme, a vigorous, stormy strain with a grand, balletic sweep. The secondary theme is presented almost immediately. Introduced by the clarinet, its lyricism, gentleness, and yearning make a strong contrast with the preceding theme. In the energetic development section these two melodies are intertwined with the folk tune from the introduction, a structural device Tchaikovsky had first employed in Romeo and Juliet to join the introduction more closely with the rest of the work. A massive climax ends the development and leads into the recapitulation of the stormy main theme and the yearning complementary melody, this latter here sung by the oboe. The closing pages bring the movement round full circle with a quiet reminder of Down by Mother Volga from the horn and bassoon.

The second movement was taken whole from Undine, Tchaikovsky's unsuccessful opera of 1869. Having failed to secure its performance, the composer destroyed the score of the work except for this excerpt and a few other fragments. In the opera, this music was used as a wedding march, though one considerably more subdued in character than the similar pieces by Mendelssohn and Wagner, and in the Symphony it takes the place of the slow movement. The center of this three-part movement (A–B–A) is a treatment of Spin, My Spinner — one of the Fifty Russian Folksongs that Tchaikovsky arranged for publication in 1868-1869 — begun by the clarinet accompanied by icy, octave figurations in the flutes. The third movement is a quicksilver Scherzo, much indebted to the music of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, whose central trio shifts rhythmic gears into a jaunty duple meter.

"Magnificent" was the rare complimentary word the finale brought from César Cui, the least-known member of The Five and one of Tchaikovsky's bitterest musical enemies. The movement, a dazzling display of orchestral color and rhythmic exuberance, is a set of variations on the Ukrainian tune The Crane. A slow introduction for full orchestra presents the basic shape of the melody before the variations are begun by the strings. The tiny tune is presented over and over, each time appearing in a different orchestral vestment so that the variations are based as much on changing tone color as on melodic manipulation. As a foil to the movement's propulsive rhythmic energy, Tchaikovsky added a lyrical melody, first heard in the violins and then repeated by the flutes. Joyous festivity, however, is at the heart of this music, and it is not kept long at bay by tender sentiment. The finale gathers momentum as it goes, becoming a swirling, fiery Cossack dance driven by one of the most athletic displays of rhythmic electricity to be found in Tchaikovsky's (or anyone else's) music.

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern’s direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern’s fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled “Britten’s Orchestra” was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany’s Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra’s history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell’s works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the “Universe” Symphony and their first recording of the “Emerson” piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, “The Grammar of Conducting,” Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf ’s collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.

Composed in 1993.
Premiered on October 22, 1993 in Los Angeles, conducted by Christof Perick.

John Harbison, one of America's leading composers, was born in Orange, New Jersey on December 20, 1938, and studied at Harvard and Princeton, where his principal teachers included Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Earl Kim; additional studies were in Berlin with Boris Blacher. Harbison has received many awards and fellowships, including those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, BMI, Kennedy Center, Guggenheim Foundation, American Composers Orchestra and American Music Center; he also holds four honorary doctorates. In May 1987, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his cantata The Flight into Egypt; in 1998, he received the prestigious Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. Harbison has been Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1969, and has also taught at CalArts, Boston University, Duke University and the Aspen Music Festival. His residencies include Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, American Academy in Rome and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He was Resident Composer with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1986-1987, and Creative Chair with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1990 to 1992; he has directed Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music since 2005. Harbison has received commissions from the Fromm, Koussevitzky, Rockefeller and Naumburg Foundations, as well as from the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, New Haven, Minnesota, Oregon, St. Paul and San Francisco. His works include five symphonies, three operas, concertos for piano, flute, brass choir, viola, cello, double bass, oboe and violin, music for orchestra, and many compositions for a wide variety of vocal and instrumental chamber ensembles. His opera The Great Gatsby, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, was premiered to great acclaim in December 1999 and has since been performed by Lyric Opera of Chicago and revived by the Met. Among his commissions is the sacred motet Abraham, premiered in the presence of the late Pope John Paul II on January 17, 2004 at a concert at the Vatican on the theme of "Reconciliation Between Jews, Christians and Muslims." In addition to his experience as a composer and teacher, Harbison is also known as a conductor and performer. He won first prize in conducting under Herbert von Karajan at the Salzburg Sommerakademie, and for several years led Boston's Cantata Singers, a group specializing in Baroque and contemporary music. As a performer, he is active as a jazz pianist and a chamber music violist.

Harbison wrote of The Most Often Used Chords, "I compose most of my music in spiral-bound notebooks, and I tend to buy many types to keep different pieces visually separate. Most of these notebooks contain, inside the covers, little instruction guides on the fundamentals of music. I'd often contemplated them in a day-dreaming state until, one evening, in a notebook I bought for my Third Symphony, my eye fell upon Gli accordi più usati. This full-page catalog of the ten 'most often used chords,' listed first in [the key of] C and then transposed up by half-steps eleven times, was never meant to be played in sequence. But, to my ear, it made an accidentally attractive, somewhat Italianate progression, and I realized with pleasure that these are chords I hardly ever use.

"Before I was really aware of what was happening, I had composed a chaconne [a piece built on a repeating phrase or chord sequence] for small orchestra based on this Italian page, and had begun other movements based on bits from the instruction manuals, some of which I will quote below. The emerging piece seemed to express my delight in these [John] Cagean found-objects, my pleasure in re-discovering these simple patterns, and my enjoyment of the restricted [harmonic] vocabularies they proposed. The Most Often Used Chords is essentially a work of play, taking place in a realm where free fantasy and simple theory meet and find they can harmonize with each other.

"Toccata. '1) Use these charts to form chords in any key: major, minor, diminished, augmented. The construction of these chords involves simply raising or lowering one or more tones one half-step. 2) Here are the two scales you need: major and minor. 3) There are seven modes: each begins on a different white key.'

"Variazioni. 'The chord of chords is the triad (ex. C–E–G).' There are four variations within a frame. There is no sonority in the entire movement that is not a triad, except for a brief wayward bass line in the third variation. In this peculiar restriction lies the voice of this brief movement.

"Ciaconna [chaconne]. The ten 'most often used chords' form a ground [repeated chord sequence] against which a melody takes shape. The melody presses to break free of the ground, to spin forward in historical time, which causes an interlude after the sixth statement of the ground. At the moment of greatest tension, the melody and the ground resume. The rarified world of the exotic found-object dissolves into another world of feeling, perhaps through the composer's intervention.

"Finale. 'The Circle of Fifths is easy to memorize. Starting with F and moving clockwise [around the circular chart of chords], the keys can be learned by saying Fat Cats Go Down Alleys Eating Bread. The keys counterclockwise can be leaned by repeating Boys Eat Aging Dogs' Good Cold Food.' I once learned the lines of the staff by remembering Every Good Boy Does Fine. My amusement at these new rubrics is reflected in the tone of the movement. In addition to the increasingly crazed appearances of the Circle of Fifths, two other tables from the same notebook appear: the Table of Contracting Note Values and the Table of Expanding Intervals (which leads inexorably to the use of all twelve tones)."

"The piece is, of course, intelligible without any reference to this program note at all."

Composed in 1919.
Premiered on April 10, 1919 in Monte Carlo, conducted by Léon Jéhin.

Gabriel Fauré's later years were plagued by increasing deafness and infirmity. He tried to keep his ailments secret, especially his loss of hearing, fearing that their discovery would endanger his post as Director of the Paris Conservatoire. He was surprisingly successful at his deception for several years, but by 1919 his condition became obvious enough that he was asked by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with all possible tact, to resign his position. Through the efforts of Paul Léon, the Fine Arts Minister, a small pension was arranged for him, but his financial outlook still offered a troubling insecurity. To aid his situation, friends and students sponsored concerts and publications in his honor, and he was assigned a number of editing jobs by the publisher Durand, including a new edition of Bach's organ works in collaboration with Joseph Bonnet.

Just as he was beginning the period of transition into retirement, Fauré accepted a commission from Prince Albert I of Monaco to supply the music for a one-act divertissement, a project he was convinced had been initiated by his old teacher Saint-Saëns out of concern for his condition. The text for the entertainment was to be written by René Fauchois, Fauré's librettist for the opera Pénélope, after a poem of Verlaine that recalled the elegantly sensual world of 18th-century Versailles. The decor was inspired by Watteau's famous painting The Swing. In his book on Fauré, Robert Orledge summarized the slight plot: "Harlequin, Gilles and Columbine, comedians from the Italian commedia dell'arte, amuse themselves on a free day amidst the rustic decor of a Cytherean island. Suddenly their fashionable theater audience arrives — the Lindors, Clymènes and Lydés — and the humble performers, hidden behind the bushes, are treated in their turn to an unexpected show that the marquises and marchionesses, inspired by love, provide for them without realising it." This delicate stage morceau, which Fauré titled Masques et Bergamasques, was unveiled in Monte Carlo on April 10, 1919, preceded on the program by Reynaldo Hahn's two-act opera Nausicaa, also with a libretto by Fauchois.

Fauré provided a score of eight pieces for Masques et Bergamasques, all of which, except for the newly composed Pastorale, were derived from earlier compositions whose creation spanned some fifty years. The 1869 Intermède symphonique for piano duet served as the basis for the Overture; the Menuet and Gavotte also date from piano pieces of 1869. (The Intermède and Menuet had been linked once before as movements in the Symphonie in F, Op. 20, of 1869-1873.) Other music accompanying the Monte Carlo production included the well-known Pavane and arrangements of vocal works, in whose orchestration Fauré was assisted by Marcel Samuel-Rousseau. The morning after the premiere, Fauré reported to his wife in Paris that "the performance met with success. The dances were attractive, the decor and costumes excellent." Albert Carré, the Director of the Opéra-Comique and a visitor at the rehearsals for the premiere, shared Fauré's enthusiasm for Masques et Bergamasques, and staged the new piece at his theater in Paris on March 4, 1920.

Soon after its stage premiere in Monte Carlo, Fauré chose four movements from the complete score of Masques et Bergamasques to comprise an orchestral suite. This Suite, one of his last works for orchestra, was premiered in Paris on November 11, 1919, conducted by Philippe Gaubert. Like the best of Fauré's music, Masques et Bergamasques demonstrates a refined sensibility and graceful elegance that seems quintessentially French (and simultaneously anti-German, his followers would have insisted). Charles Haynes observed that "his music is far from the impassioned romantic outpourings of his own days; it displays those qualities of true classicism which one looks for in Mozart: taste, restraint, limpidity of texture, balanced proportions — it is, in a word, civilized music."

The Suite opens with a delicious Ouverture. Its main theme, a sprightly, dancing strain presented by the violins above a bubbling accompaniment, is complemented by a lyrical second melody that is broad in phrasing and stately in expression. Following an untroubled development of the preceding material in Fauré's most clear-eyed, neo-classical manner, the recapitulation returns the earlier themes to round out the precise dimensions of this charming movement. The middle movements of the Suite are Fauré's evocations of two characteristic dances of the court of Louis XIV — the lilting Menuet and the vigorous Gavotte, each fitted with a contrasting trio as its center section. A gentle Pastorale draws this enchanting Suite to a halcyon conclusion.

Composed in 1809.
Premiered on November 11, 1811 in Leipzig, conducted by Johann Philipp Schulz with Friedrich Schneider as soloist.

The year 1809 was a difficult one for Vienna and for Beethoven. In May, Napoleon invaded the city with enough firepower to send the residents scurrying and Beethoven into the basement of his brother's house. The bombardment was close enough that he covered his sensitive ears with pillows to protect them from the concussion of the blasts. On July 29th, he wrote to the publisher Breitkopf und Härtel, "We have passed through a great deal of misery. I tell you that since May 4th, I have brought into the world little that is connected; only here and there a fragment. The whole course of events has affected me body and soul.... What a disturbing, wild life around me; nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts." He bellowed his frustration at a French officer he chanced to meet: "If I were a general and knew as much about strategy as I do about counterpoint, I'd give you fellows something to think about." Austria's finances were in shambles, and the annual stipend Beethoven had been promised by several noblemen who supported his work was considerably reduced in value, placing him in a precarious pecuniary predicament. As a sturdy tree can root in flinty soil, however, a great musical work grew from these unpromising circumstances — by the end of that very year, 1809, Beethoven had completed his "Emperor" Concerto.

The sobriquet "Emperor" attached itself to the E-flat Concerto very early, though it was not of Beethoven's doing. If anything, he would have objected to the name. "Emperor" equaled "Napoleon" for Beethoven, as for most Europeans of the time, and anyone familiar with the story of the "Eroica" Symphony will remember how that particular ruler had tumbled from the great composer's esteem. "This man will trample the rights of men underfoot and become a greater tyrant than any other," he rumbled to his young friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries. The Concerto's name may have been tacked on by an early publisher or pianist because of the grand character of the work, or it may have originated with the purported exclamation during the premiere by a French officer at one particularly noble passage, "C'est l'Empereur!" The most likely explanation, however, and one ignored with a unanimity rare among musical scholars, was given by Anton Schindler, long-time friend and early biographer of Beethoven. The Viennese premiere, it seems, took place at a celebration of the Emperor's birthday.

The "Emperor" is the largest in scale of all Beethoven's concertos. It is also the last one, though he did considerable work on a sixth piano concerto in 1815 but never completed it. The Fifth Concerto is written in a virtuosic style that looks forward to the grand pianism of Liszt in its full chordal textures and wide dynamic range. Such prescience of piano technique is remarkable when it is realized that the modern, steel-frame concert grand was not perfected until 1825, and in this work, written sixteen years earlier, Beethoven envisioned possibilities offered only by this later, improved instrument.

The Concerto opens with broad chords for orchestra answered by piano before the main theme is announced by the violins. The following orchestral tutti embraces a rich variety of secondary themes leading to a repeat of all the material by the piano accompanied by the orchestra. A development ensues with "the fury of a hail-storm," wrote the eminent English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey. Following a recapitulation of the themes and the sounding of a proper chord on which to launch a cadenza, Beethoven wrote into the piano part, "Do not play a cadenza, but begin immediately what follows." At this point, he supplied a tiny, written-out solo passage that begins the coda. This being the first of his concertos that Beethoven himself would not play, he wanted to have more control over the finished product, and so he prescribed exactly what the soloist was to do. With this novel device, he initiated the practice of completely writing out all solo passages that was to become the standard method used by most later composers in their concertos.

The second movement begins with a chorale for strings. Sir George Grove dubbed this movement a sequence of "quasi-variations," with the piano providing a coruscating filigree above the orchestral accompaniment. This Adagio leads directly into the finale, a vast rondo with sonata elements. The bounding ascent of the main theme is heard first from the soloist and then from the orchestra. Developmental episodes separate the returns of the theme. The closing pages include the magical sound of drum-taps accompanying the shimmering piano chords and scales, and a final brief romp to the finish.

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern’s direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern’s fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled “Britten’s Orchestra” was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany’s Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra’s history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell’s works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the “Universe” Symphony and their first recording of the “Emerson” piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, “The Grammar of Conducting,” Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf ’s collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.

Composed in 1959 and 1971.
Premiered on June 7, 1972 in New York City, conducted by André Kostelanetz.

Copland composed Paisaje Mexicano ("Mexican Landscape") and Danza de Jalisco in 1959 at the invitation of Gian Carlo Menotti for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. The Danza was first performed in Spoleto in July 1959, but the paired works, under the title Two Mexican Pieces, were not played together until they were heard at a private concert given by the Pan American Union in Washington on April 20, 1965, with the composer conducting. In 1971, Copland added the Estribillo to the set at the request of conductor André Kostelanetz, and released them as Latin American Sketches.

Copland commented on these scores, "I would describe the character of the Latin American Sketches as being just what the title says. The tunes, the rhythms and the temperament of the pieces are folksy, while the orchestration is bright and snappy and the music sizzles along — or at least it seems to me that it does. Nevertheless, the Sketches are not so light as to be pop-concert material, although certainly they would be a light number in a regular concert, much in the same way as El Salón Mexico.

"Estribillo is based on Venezuelan popular materials and is very vigorous. Paisaje Mexicano is poetic and lyrical. Danza de Jalisco is bouncy, contrasting the rhythms of 6/8 and 3/4."

Composed in 1976-1977.
Premiered on November 25, 1978 in Liverpool, conducted by Simon Rattle with the composer as chansonnier.

Mary Shelley's cautionary novel about Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster that he created in his laboratory is perhaps even more relevant in these days of DNA sequencing and genetic engineering than it was when it was published in 1818, and it is the title of the work that won for HK Gruber (his preferred professional name) international recognition in 1978. Gruber, composer, conductor, chansonnier and double bassist, was born in Vienna in 1943 and sang in the famed Vienna Boys Choir as a child and later studied composition, performance and dance at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik. While he was playing double bass with the contemporary music ensemble "die reihe" and the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra in the 1960s, Gruber was also composing actively, and his Concerto for Orchestra won a prize at the Österreichische Jugendkulturwoche ("Austrian Youth Culture Week") in 1966, the same year he began appearing as an actor and singer. During the following decade, he played bass in the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra and founded the "MOB art & ton ART Ensemble" with composers Kurt Schwertsik and Otto Zykan to perform new and unconventional works that often tempered modern and traditional styles with elements of popular music. Gruber also gained a reputation as a cabaret-style performer during those years, and he created a sensation as the "chansonnier" in the premiere of his Frankenstein!! in Liverpool in November 1978; he has since appeared around the world in the role. He has continued to conduct (in 2009, he was appointed composer-conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra), perform as chansonnier, and compose, earning special recognition for his orchestral and concerted works (for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Ernst Kovacic, percussionist Evelyn Glennie and trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger) and his operas Gomorra, Gloria von Jaxtberg and Der Herr Nordwind, about which a critic for the London Sunday Times wrote that "nostalgic frisson and the ironic surprise are technical means used by Gruber with absolute authority to create forthright masterpieces."

Gruber wrote of Frankenstein!!, "The origins of this 'pan-demonium' go back to the Frankenstein Suite of 1971 — a sequence of songs and dances written for the Vienna 'MOB art and tone ART Ensemble,' which was then active in the field of instrumental theater. Although the Suite was a success, I was unhappy about its improvisatory structure, and also needed the resources of a full orchestra. So in 1976-1977, I completely recomposed the work in its present form. It was first performed on November 25, 1978 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Simon Rattle, with myself as soloist. For the 1979 Berlin Festival, I wrote an alternative version for soloist and twelve players (first performed that year by the Vienna ensemble 'die reihe' under Kurt Schwertsik, again with myself as soloist). Since then, the two versions have happily co-existed, and in 1983, at the Espace Cardin in Paris, Frankenstein!! entered the theatre for the first time — an unforeseen development, but one that proved suited to Artmann's multi-layered fantasy. [Vienna-born avant-garde writer and poet Hans Carl Artmann (1921-2000) established his reputation with verses in Viennese dialect and went on to win the Grand Austrian State Prize, Georg Büchner Prize and a doctorate from the University of Salzburg.]

"The title of the volume from which I took the poems of Frankenstein!! – Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime ('Noises, noises, all around: lovely new children's rhymes') — promises something innocuous, but Artmann himself has described the poems as being, among other things, 'covert political statements.' Typically he refused to explain what he meant. But his reticence is eloquent: the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so. One of the dubious figures in the pandemonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein — or whomever we choose to identify with that name — is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril. Hence the exclamation marks in the title.

"Artmann's demystification of heroic villains or villainous heroes finds a musical parallel in, for instance, the persistent alienation of conventional orchestral sound by resorting to a cupboard-full of toy instruments. However picturesque or amusing the visual effect of the toys, their primary role is musical rather than playful — even howling plastic hoses have their motivic/harmonic function. In order to do justice to the true significance of the texts it would be enough to provide some extra exercises in structural complexity. By analogy with Artmann's diction, my aim was a broad palette combining traditional musical idioms with newer and more popular ones, thus remaining true to the deceptive simplicity of texts whose forms at first glance suggest a naive and innocently cheerful atmosphere."

Composed in 1936
Premiered on May 2, 1936 in Moscow, conducted by the composer.

When Prokofiev returned for good to his native Russia in 1933 from his years in the West, he quickly espoused the Soviet philosophy of promoting music that would appeal to the widest masses of the people. "It is the duty of the composer to serve his fellow men, to beautify human life and point the way to a radiant future," he said. Succeeding his earlier works, which had established his reputation as a mogul of modernity, was a steady stream of superb scores more conservative in temper and accessible in idiom — Lt. Kijé, Alexander Nevsky, the Fifth Symphony, Romeo and Juliet and the Second Violin Concerto. Prokofiev's music for children — Twelve Piano Pieces for Children (transcribed for orchestra in 1941 as Summer's Day Suite), Three Songs for Children, Winter Bonfire and Peter and the Wolf — sprang from his sincere concern that his music should be of practical use to his countrymen.

The suggestion to create Peter and the Wolf came to Prokofiev from Natalie Satz, director of the Moscow Children's Theater. The Theater produced operas, concerts and ballets for and with children, and Prokofiev was familiar with its work through taking his sons there on several occasions. Soon after the Theater moved into a new home in March 1936, Satz asked Prokofiev to write a piece demonstrating the orchestral instruments by associating them with images. "How about the flute as a little bird?" she suggested. "Absolutely," Prokofiev agreed. "Perhaps a number of animals and birds, and at least one person," Satz urged. Prokofiev's imagination was fired. He devised his own tale about a boy and a wolf, and completed the music for it in just two weeks. Peter and the Wolf was an immediate success.

A few days after the premiere, Sergei Prokofiev, the famed "children's composer," was approached by Anastas Mikoyan, Soviet Commissar of Supplies, with an interesting proposal. Would he participate in a program to popularize children's songs, poems and fairy tales by writing a little tune that would be printed on attractive wrappings of chocolates, toys and sweets? Prokofiev at first hesitated, but agreed as soon as he learned that his new song would be used for the wrapper of the chocolates that were his childhood favorite.

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern's direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern's fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled "Britten's Orchestra" was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany's Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra's history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell's works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the "Universe" Symphony and their first recording of the "Emerson" piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo's NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, "The Grammar of Conducting," Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf 's collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.

Composed in 1821.

In addition to being born with the proverbial silver spoon, Felix Mendelssohn was virtually bestowed a golden baton as a natal gift. His parents' household was among the most cultured and affluent in all of Berlin, but his family saw to it that his privilege was well tempered by discipline and responsibility. Young Felix arose at 5:00 every morning (6:00 on Sunday), and spent several hours in private tutoring with the best available teachers. When his musical talents became obvious in his early years, he was first given instruction in piano, and soon thereafter in theory and composition by the distinguished pedagogue Carl Friedrich Zelter. Mendelssohn's earliest dated composition is a cantata completed on January 3, 1820, three weeks before his eleventh birthday, though that work was almost certainly preceded by others whose exact dates are not recorded. To display the boy's blossoming musical abilities, the Mendelssohn mansion was turned into a twice-monthly concert hall featuring the precocious youngster's achievements. A large summer house was fitted as an auditorium seating several hundred people, and every other Sunday morning the city's finest musicians were brought in to perform both repertory works and the latest flowers of Mendelssohn's creativity. Those matinees — complemented by an elegant luncheon — began in 1822, when Mendelssohn was thirteen. He selected the programs, led the rehearsals, appeared as piano soloist, played violin in the chamber pieces, and even conducted, though in those early years he was still too short to be seen by the players in the back rows unless he stood on a stool. With sister Fanny participating as pianist, sister Rebecca as singer and brother Paul as cellist, it is little wonder that invitations to those happy gatherings were among the most eagerly sought and highly prized of any in Berlin society. By 1825, Mendelssohn had written over eighty works for those concerts, including operas and operettas, string quartets and other chamber pieces, concertos and a series of thirteen sinfonias for strings.

The youthful sinfonias of the years 1821 to 1823 (which are not considered in the numbering of Mendelssohn's five mature works in the form) are a charming mélange of naïveté, wit and artistic insight concocted with breathtaking technical skill. Their style is indebted to Bach, Mozart and Haydn, but some also show a strong Romantic sensibility that continued as an important strain throughout Mendelssohn's career. These sinfonias do not all follow the four-movement Classical model, some comprising only a single movement, others as many as five. It is just such precocious works as these that led Mendelssohn's old mentor, Zelter, to rise up in front of the guests at a dinner party celebrating the first rehearsal of the fifteen-year-old Felix's opera, The Two Nephews, and announce, "My dear boy, from this day you are no longer an apprentice, but an independent member of the brotherhood of musicians. I proclaim you independent in the name of Mozart, Haydn and old father Bach."

The Sinfonia No. 5, composed in ten days during September 1821, demonstrates how thoroughly the thirteen-year-old Mendelssohn had assimilated the orchestral traits and techniques of earlier masters. The sonata-form first movement is launched by a downward-stepping, unison motive soon followed by bustling scale figurations. These two elements comprise the entire thematic materials for the movement — the formal second subject, à la Haydn, is a transposition of the opening motive — and are ingeniously treated in a manner that confirms Mendelssohn's close study of both the motivic development processes of the Classical masters and the contrapuntal intricacies of Sebastian Bach. The Andante is an instrumental song-without-words whose sweet mood and pastoral lyricism presage the Nocturne that Mendelssohn included in his incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream two decades later. The twelve-year-old composer made the finale, another compact sonata structure, a showcase for his considerable contrapuntal technique, devising an almost continuous web of interlocking exchanges that pauses or comes to a unanimous statement only at the most important structural junctures, not least the delightful little winking gesture that ends the movement.

Composed in 1981.
Premiered on December 6, 1986 in Lafayette, Louisiana, conducted by the composer.

Alan Hovhaness, one of the most intriguing and prolific figures in American music, was born Alan Vaness Chakmakjian in Somerville, Massachusetts on March 8, 1911; his Armenian-born father was a chemistry professor and his mother was Scottish. Hovhaness began improvising and composing at an early age and studied at the New England Conservatory in the 1930s with Frederick Converse. In 1940, he was appointed organist at an Armenian church near Boston, from which post he investigated the music of his father's native land. Two years later, he attended the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood on scholarship, but criticism there of his music by Copland and Foss, his intensive study of Oriental music, philosophy and religion, and his increasingly mystical attitude toward his art left him dissatisfied with his earlier work, so he summarily destroyed most of what he had written before 1940, said to have consisted of seven symphonies, five string quartets, a number of operas and several hundred other compositions.

The influence of Armenian and Oriental music on Hovhaness' work became pervasive after 1945. In style, his works are primarily melodic, often melismatic and incantatory, with a harmonic vocabulary dependent on various modal formulas. There are frequent excursions into fugue and imitative textures, testimony to his long interest in the music of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. During the 1950s, he traveled widely, notably to India, Japan and Korea, where his music was well received and where he discovered new stylistic elements that soon appeared in his compositions. Like Olivier Messiaen of France, Hovhaness sought to reconcile mystical and mundane, Occidental and Oriental, ancient and modern in music of distinctive personality. He died in Seattle on June 21, 2000.

Hovhaness' musical output is diverse in content and vast in quantity, probably exceeded in the 20th century only by that of the Frenchman Darius Milhaud. There are nearly 400 separate pieces, including nine operas, two ballets, 67 symphonies (!), several dozen independent works for orchestra and wind band, a hundred chamber pieces, an almost equal number for voices, and many compositions for solo piano. Most of his works have evocative titles. Among the symphonies, for example, are ones called Mysterious Mountain, Nanga Parvat (one of the world's most remote mountains, in Kashmir), Silver Pilgrimage (after a novel by the Indian writer M. Anantanarayan), Fra Angelico (the 15th-century Florentine painter), St. Vartan (an Armenian folk hero martyred in 451 A.D.), Ararat, Odysseus and Mount St. Helens; one of his symphonies was written for string orchestra and Korean percussion instruments.

Given his early immersion in Christian belief and ceremony, it is not surprising that Hovhaness was deeply moved by the holiday of Christmas throughout his life. His wife, soprano Hinako Fujihara Hovhaness, recalled that he "always wished to write a 'Christmas' symphony that would express his childhood visions of the holiday," and in 1981 he captured some of his feelings about several aspects of the season in the four movements comprising his luminous Symphony No. 49 for String Orchestra: Celestial Prophecy; The Angel; Pastoral; and The Star. Celestial Prophecy encompasses three complementary tableaux: the heavenly pronouncement of the Virgin Birth is suggested by a rainbow of melody that arches upward before bursting into excited flourishes; an acclamation in the form of a chorale and its elaborations whose modalism and warm harmonization recall English folksong; and a fugue, one of Hovhaness' most characteristic musical techniques, whose jubilant nature seems to celebrate this special moment in the church calendar. Hovhaness' brief evocation of The Angel is peaceable and consoling. The subtle Orientalism of the gapped-scale melody of the Pastoral suggests both the shepherds who participated in the Nativity story and its Near East setting, while the vigorous closing fugue may express their excitement at the prophecy fulfilled. For some of his choral works, Hovhaness made new musical settings for the texts of old hymns, one of which was an anthem that he composed in 1927 on Watchman Tell Us of the Night, written in 1825 by the British writer, linguist, economist, member of parliament and governor of Hong Kong John Bowring (1792-1872). Hovhaness based The Star on that melody, which is given first in a hymnal setting punctuated by a quick, playful phrase and then in an elaborate, extended fugue. The work closes with a gently swaying lullaby reminiscent of the pastorales traditionally played in Italian churches on Christmas Eve, a thoughtful recollection of the playful phrase from the beginning of the movement, and a final verse in hymn style of Watchman Tell Us of the Night.

Composed in 1919.

André Caplet, born in Le Havre in 1878, showed an early talent for music and by fourteen was playing violin at the Grand Theatre in his hometown. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1896 as a student in composition, and there developed his creative gifts sufficiently to win the Prix de Rome for his cantata Myrrha in 1901. While still in school, Caplet began conducting and performing (as a timpanist) in various Parisian orchestras, and in 1899 he was appointed director of music at the Théâtre de l'Odéon. His other Parisian posts included conducting appointments at the Opéra as well as the Lamoureux and Pasdeloup concerts; from 1910 to 1914, he was the conductor of the Boston Opera Company. Caplet is also remembered from his close friendship with Claude Debussy, who entrusted him with proofreading his scores and orchestrating Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien and the Children's Corner Suite. He volunteered for military service during World War I, and an injury to his lungs from gas forced him thereafter to limit his conducting in favor of composing and hastened his death from pleurisy in 1925. Caplet's long involvement with opera gave him a keen sense of the possibilities of the human voice, and most of his compositions are songs or works for small vocal ensembles, many showing the influence of Debussy's Impressionism. Among his few compositions for instruments are chamber works for flute and piano, cello and piano, a score for military band, a concerted work for cello and orchestra, two Divertissements for harp and the Conte fantastique for harp and string quartet.

In his Conte fantastique ("Fantastic Story"), Caplet created a miniature tone poem based on Edgar Allen Poe's chilling tale The Mask of the Red Death. The score contains the following preface: "Death, that horrible and fatal specter, haunts the region, seeking its prey. A young Prince and his friends challenge the plague by shutting themselves into a fortified abbey. There, the Prince rewards his guests with a magnificent masked ball. However, every hour, at the striking of an ancient clock, the dancers movements seem paralyzed. When the echo of the chimes dies away, the party resumes, but each time with less spirit and a growing sense of foreboding. Still, the music animates the dancers again. The couples whirl feverishly. Suddenly, the Prince stops the music with a brusque gesture. There, standing in the shadow of the clock just as it booms out its midnight toll, is a figure wrapped in a shroud. A mortal terror runs through the hall. It is the Red Death, come like a thief in the night. One after another the guests fall, convulsed, to the floor of the hall, covered with a deadly dew."

Composed in 1904.
Premiered on November 6, 1904 in Paris, with Lucille Wurmser-Delcourt as soloist.

The harp is among the most ancient of instruments. Its existence in Mesopotamia is documented as far back as 3,000 B.C., and it was known virtually from the dawn of recorded history in Egypt, Israel, and Greece. Harps were common throughout Christian Europe; it is still the heraldic symbol of Ireland. The instrument remained essentially unchanged in its construction until about 1810, when the Parisian piano maker Sébastien Érard introduced a system of pedals to chromatically alter the pitches of the open strings. Though this instrument could effectively negotiate every note within its range, it was somewhat clumsy of operation, and various attempts were made to simplify the harp's mechanics. At the end of the 19th century, Gustave Lyon developed a "chromatic harp," a pedal-less instrument in which a single string was devoted to each chromatic note. The Parisian instrument-making firm of Pleyel put Lyon's invention into production in 1897, in direct competition with Érard et Compagnie and its long-established harp. By the turn of the century, Pleyel was casting about for ways to win some business from Érard, and asked Claude Debussy to compose a work specifically for the new instrument. In the spring of 1904 he wrote a matched pair of dances, one "sacred" and one "profane," for chromatic harp and string orchestra. The work was first heard at a Parisian concert conducted by Édouard Colonne on November 6, 1904; Lucille Wurmser-Delcourt was soloist. It should be added that Lyon's chromatic harp, with its vast curtain of strings, found little favor, and that it is Érard's double-action pedal harp which remains the standard instrument to this day.

The Danse sacrée et Danse profane comprises two brief works joined as one. The Danse sacrée is said (by the conductor Ernest Ansermet) to have been suggested to Debussy by a piano piece of his friend, the Portuguese composer and conductor Francisco de Lacerda (1869-1934). According to no less an authority than Manuel de Falla, the Danse profane was influenced by Spanish dance and techniques of melodic embellishment.

Composed in 1879-1880.
Premiered on October 30, 1881 in St. Petersburg, conducted by Eduard Nápravnik.

In 1879, Tchaikovsky's publisher, Peter Jurgenson, requested that his client devise some festive strains of celebratory nature to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the coronation of Czar Alexander II. The project was too important for Tchaikovsky to refuse, so he set to work composing a programmatic overture based on some popular themes that would depict one of Mother Russia's proudest moments — the defeat of Napoleon at Moscow. "The overture will be very noisy," Tchaikovsky warned his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, in a letter dated October 22, 1880. "I wrote it without much warmth or enthusiasm; therefore it has no great artistic value." He called the piece, simply, Overture, 1812. As though some psychic compensatory apparatus had switched on while he was writing 1812, Tchaikovsky simultaneously created a delightful work on an intimate scale for string orchestra, a score of geniality and grace and nearly Mozartian sensitivity — the Serenade for Strings. "The Serenade," Tchaikovsky continued in his letter to Mme. von Meck, "I wrote from an inward impulse; I felt it deeply and venture to hope that this work is not without artistic qualities."

Tchaikovsky titled the first movement Pezzo ['piece'] in forma di Sonatina, "sonatina" being a sonata form without a development section. A sonorous introduction in slow tempo prefaces the main part of the movement. The principal theme is a lilting strain that sets the sweetly lyrical style obtaining throughout most of the work. The complementary subject is a skittering melody in rapid rhythms. A recall of the introduction rounds out the opening movement. The following movement is one of Tchaikovsky's best-known and most admired waltzes. The Elégie touches on the deepest emotions elicited by the Serenade. The finale, Théma russe, begins with a slow prologue based on a Volga River work song that appeared in a collection of folk music by Mili Balakirev. The ensuing Allegro con spirito uses another Russian folk song, this one a street ditty from the Kolomna district, near Moscow. The slow introduction from the first movement returns before a final, Cossackian flourish brings the Serenade to a rousing close.

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern's direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern's fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled "Britten's Orchestra" was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany's Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra's history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell's works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the "Universe" Symphony and their first recording of the "Emerson" piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo's NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, "The Grammar of Conducting," Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf 's collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.

Composed in 1906-1908; orchestrated in 1910.
Original piano version premiered on December 18, 1908 in Paris by Harold Bauer.

One of the greatest joy of Debussy's life was his infant daughter, Claude-Emma, affectionately called "Chouchou," who was born in October 1904. The composer's friend and first biographer Louis Laloy recorded that Chouchou was "the fulfillment of one of his most cherished hopes." Debussy moved his expanded family into a new apartment in the Avenue de Bois de Boulogne (now the Avenue Foch) so that Chouchou could have her own nursery, which he filled with toys and dolls. He confided to his publisher, Durand, that he could "extract confidences from some of Chouchou's dolls. The soul of a doll is more mysterious than even Maeterlinck imagines. It does not really tolerate the kind of clap-trap so many human souls put up with." Inspired equally by his affection for Chouchou and by his musings about her anthropomorphic toys, he wrote the charmingly piquant Serenade for the Doll in 1906, intending to publish it in a piano method then being assembled by Octavie Carrier-Belleuse, a fellow student at the Conservatoire who had established her own teaching studio. Publication of Carrier-Belleuse's Méthode moderne de piano was delayed until 1910, however, so Debussy issued the Serenade separately in 1906. Two years later, he added to it five movements grown from his adult's view of childhood's delights to create the "Little Suite for Piano," Children's Corner. (The work's English titles were occasioned by both Debussy's anglophilia and the English governess, one Miss Gibbs recently arrived from London, into whose charge Chouchou had been placed.) The dedication of Durand's first edition, issued in September 1908, read: "To my dear little Chouchou, with her father's affectionate apologies for what follows." Children's Corner enjoyed a fine success: it was given its premiere by the distinguished English pianist Harold Bauer at a concert of the Cercle musical in Paris on December 18, 1908; Durand's publication sold some 20,000 copies during the composer's lifetime; and André Caplet made a sensitive orchestration of it in 1910. In 1913, Debussy paid his second, and final, musical tribute to Chouchou with the ballet La Boîte à joujoux ("The Toy Box") — Chouchou died in 1919, during a diphtheria epidemic, but her father was spared that grief by his own death the year before.

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum is Debussy's luminous but chiding send-up of Muzio Clementi's 1817 compendium of pedantic piano exercises titled Gradus ad Parnassum — "Steps to Parnassus." "[It] is a sort-of hygienic and progressive gymnastics," Debussy wrote to Durand. "It should therefore be played every morning, before breakfast." One of Chouchou's favorite toys was a velvet stuffed version of Jumbo the Elephant, around which father and daughter developed a little bedtime ritual whose musical souvenir is Jumbo's Lullaby. Serenade for the Doll is a gentle dance whose staccato accompaniment recalls the strumming of a guitar, the serenader's classic instrument. The Snow is Dancing captures the wonder, beauty and shimmering stillness of winter's falling snow. The Little Shepherd is evoked by a long, winding melody portraying the boy's improvised piping on his rustic instrument, which is spun out over a simple background.

The cakewalk, a shuffling dance performed with the body swayed backwards, originated in the 1840s among American and Caribbean slaves as a strutting promenade mocking the manners of their owners at their grand balls. Festive competitions of the dance were judged by the white masters, who awarded a cake as the prize. The cakewalk was assimilated into the minstrel shows of the day and became fashionable as a social dance at the turn of the 20th century; it was one of the seeds from which American jazz sprouted. Debussy's Golliwogg's Cakewalk was inspired by the popular doll of that name, based on an African character, that Florence Upton created in 1895.

Composed 1779-1780.
Premiered on January 27, 1866 in Frankfurt.

In 1776, Emperor Joseph II established the National Theater in Vienna to produce one of his favorite forms of musical entertainment: Singspiel — popular operas in German with spoken texts. The Austrian playwright and poet Gottlieb Stephanie was put in charge of the operation. Late in 1779, Mozart, then 23 and longing to compose operas for one of Europe's music capitals, convinced Johann Andreas Schachtner, court trumpeter, long-time family friend, poet manqué and librettist for his youthful Singspiel Bastien und Bastienne, to work up a text for Vienna based on Das Serail ("The Seraglio") by Franz Josef Sebastiani, which had been set to music by the Passau composer Joseph Friebert and published in Bolzano the year before. The main characters are a Turkish sultan and two of his slaves, the comely Zaide, who has captured the sultan's interest, and the defiant Gomatz, who has captured hers. Zaide and Gomatz manage to escape at the end of Act I but they are recaptured by the irate sultan in Act II. Mozart, informed that the piece would not be cheerful enough for the National Theater, broke off the music at that point and the original libretto is now lost, so the fate of the slaves in Act III remains unknown. None of the piece was performed during Mozart's lifetime, though he did eventually succeed at the National Theater when Stephanie offered him the libretto for The Abduction from the Seraglio soon after the composer moved to Vienna in 1781. Mozart's widow, Constanze, discovered the manuscript among his papers in 1798, the fragments were published in 1838, and Zaide, with the missing dialogue supplied by the German singer and director Friedrich Carl Gollmick, was finally staged in Frankfurt on January 27, 1866, the 110th anniversary of the composer's birth. The dulcet aria Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben ("Rest gently, my tender love") is sung by Zaide to Gomatz when she places a picture of herself beside his bed as he sleeps.

Arranged for voice and piano in 1950 and 1952; orchestrated in 1954 and 1957.
Set I premiered on June 18, 1950 at the Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk, England, by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten; Set II premiered on July 24, 1952 at the Castle Hill Concerts in Ipswich, Massachusetts by William Warfield and the composer. Orchestral versions premiered on January 7, 1955 in Los Angeles, conducted by Alfred Wallenstein with William Warfield as soloist, and May 25, 1958 in Ojai, California, conducted by the composer with Grace Bumbry as soloist.

Soon after he completed the imposing song cycle on Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson in March 1950, Copland turned his creative attention to some lighter fare by "newly arranging" a set of five traditional 19th-century American songs for voice and piano on a commission from English composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears for performance at the Aldeburgh Festival. A second group of five followed in 1952, and Copland orchestrated Set I in 1954 and Set II three years later. In her study of Copland's music, Julia Smith suggested that the Old American Songs form "a kind of vocal suite, the accompaniments, practical but exceedingly attractive, offer moods by turns nostalgic, energetic, sentimental, devotional and humorous." The most familiar melody among these Songs is Simple Gifts, the evergreen Shaker tune (also known with an original text by British poet and folk singer Sydney Carter as The Lord of the Dance) that Copland had earlier used with such excellent effect in Appalachian Spring. Like the other Songs, it taps a deep, quintessentially American sentiment in its sturdy simplicity and its plain words, qualities that Copland captured perfectly in his colorful, atmospheric settings.

The following notes in the orchestral score give the sources for the Old American Songs: "The Boatmen's Dance. Published in Boston in 1843 as an 'original banjo melody' by Old Dan D. Emmett, who later composed Dixie. From the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays in Brown University. The Dodger. As sung by Mrs. Emma Dusenberry of Mena, Arkansas, who learned it in the 1880s. Supposedly used in the Cleveland-Blaine presidential campaign of 1884. Published by John A. and Alan Lomax in Our Singing Country. Long Time Ago. Issued in 1837 by George Pope Morris, who adapted the words, and Charles Edward Horn, who arranged the music from an anonymous 'black-face' tune. Also from the Harris Collection. Simple Gifts. A favorite melody of the Shaker sect, from the period 1837-1847. The melody and words were quoted by Edward D. Andrews in his book of Shaker rituals, songs and dances, entitled The Gift To Be Simple. I Bought Me A Cat. A children's nonsense song. This version was sung to the composer by the American playwright Lynn Riggs, who learned it during his boyhood in Oklahoma.

"The Little Horses. A children's lullaby, originating in the Southern States, the date of this song is unknown. The adaptation is founded in part on John A. and Alan Lomax's version in Folk Song U.S.A. Zion's Walls. A revivalist song, the original melody and words are credited to John G. McCurry, compiler of the Social Harp. The Golden Willow Tree. A variant of the well-known Anglo-American ballad more usually called The Golden Vanity, this version is based on a recording issued by the Library of Congress Music Division from its collection of the Archive of American Folk Song. Justus Begley recorded it with banjo accompaniment for Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in 1937. At the River. The words and melody of this hymn are by the Rev. Robert Lowry, and it dates from 1865. Ching-a-ring-chaw. The words of this minstrel song have been adapted from the original in the Harris Collection at Brown University."

Composed in 1899-1900.
Premiered on November 11, 1901 in Munich, conducted by the composer.

Mahler's Fourth Symphony, the most modest in length and orchestral requirements of his ten, had its roots as far back as 1892, when the composer was 32. Those were the years, extending through the composition of the Fourth Symphony, during which Mahler was imbibing the folk traditions of Germany as they were set down in an early-19th-century anthology of poems titled Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn"). American musicologist Edward Downes noted a deep-seated personal need in Mahler's interest in these simple peasant verses: "Like most German Romantic artists, Mahler felt a love for folk art amounting almost to worship. In part this may have been the nostalgia of the complex intellectual city-dweller for an Eden of lost innocence, of freshness, of naïveté." This vein of innocence, of child-like simplicity is at the heart of this lovely Fourth Symphony.

In 1892, Mahler set to music one of the Wunderhorn poems, Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen ("Heaven is chock full of violins"). He completed the song, which he named after its first line, Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden ("We revel in heavenly pleasures"), in February 1892, and made an orchestral arrangement of it the following month. When he set to work on his Third Symphony in 1895, he intended to include this song as the last of its movements. The vast musical panorama of the Third Symphony, perhaps the best example of Mahler's philosophy that sought to embody "the world in a symphony," was conceived to address individual movements to such matters as "What the flowers tell me," "What the forest creatures tell me," and so forth for "the night," "the angels" and "love." The finale was to have included Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden to elucidate "What the Child tells me." Mahler, however, decided to drop this song from the Third Symphony, probably because it would have been an anti-climax after the stentorian ending of the preceding movement. Instead, he determined to explore the world of this "child of heaven" more extensively, in a separate work. Thus was the Fourth Symphony born.

It is important to understanding the Fourth Symphony to realize that its entire mood and structure are built to lead to the finale — the first three movements serve to prepare for and illuminate the closing vision of Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden. The composer is reported to have said, "In the first three movements there reigns the serenity of a higher realm, a realm strange to us, oddly frightening, even terrifying. In the finale, the child, which in its previous existence belonged to this higher realm, tells us what it all means…." The child-like simplicity and open-faced sincerity of the last movement supply not only the general emotional framework of the Symphony, but also influence its musical materials. The development section of the first movement, for example, contains a chirruping theme for four unison flutes derived from the concluding song. It is not the normal course of creation for a work to proceed forward from its ending. In this instance, however, this is what happened, and the first three movements need to be viewed as the various steps through which the listener is prepared to understand the full implications of the finale. (Incidentally, Wagner followed a similar "working-backwards" procedure in the conception of his Ring operas.)

The Symphony opens in G major with the distinctive sound of sleigh bells that recurs at important structural points throughout the movement. A number of melodic ideas are tossed out to comprise the main theme group before the music moves, properly enough, to D major for the second theme, a sweet, Viennese melody high in the cellos. The sleigh bells mark the beginning of a lengthy development section that thoroughly explores much of the material heard thus far, with a particular emphasis on the clear pipings of the augmented woodwind choir. After one of the few large climaxes of the Symphony, the development quiets before it comes to an abrupt stop. The music takes a quick breath, and the recapitulation begins in the sunny mood of the opening. The exposition themes are again assayed to bring the movement to an invigorating close.

Mahler's original designation for the second-movement scherzo was Freund Hein spielt auf ("Friend Hein plays"). "Hein" was the character of German legend who used his fiddle to lure reluctant travelers to the Great Beyond. This eerie movement, perhaps inspired by the not dissimilar visions of Liszt, Saint-Saëns and Berlioz, alternates a diabolical scherzo with brighter trios. Much of the mood comes from the solo violinist, who is instructed to tune a second instrument a full step higher than normal to produce a more strident tone quality. Of this movement, Mahler wrote, "The scherzo is so uncanny, almost sinister, that your hair may stand on end. Yet in the following Adagio, where all complications are dissolved, you will feel that it was not really all that sinister…." Rather like a bad dream followed by a reassuring sunrise.
The serene third movement is in the form of a variation on two themes, though it follows the formal outlines of each theme only tenuously. The first set of variations, dominated by the string choir founded upon a resonant pizzicato bass line, alternates with the second set of variations, given largely to the winds. The oboe introduces the second theme.

The vision of the closing movement is couched in the simplest of musical forms — the strophic song. Each verse of the text, filled with images of an idealized Medieval peasant life, ends with a chorale-like refrain borrowed from the music of the alto solo in the Third Symphony. The sleigh bells and accompanying music of the first movement return (the noted English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey dubbed these, rather ingloriously, "farm-yard noises") to mark the beginnings of further stanzas. For the concluding stanza, Mahler executed a harmonic sleight-of-hand as the music moves from its G major base to the airy key of E major. More than just a technical device, this gesture gives a special meaning to the closing text, "There's no music at all on earth, Which can ever compare with ours," sung by the heaven-blessed child. Its beauty, calm and simplicity are among the most pacific moments in all of music.

A shimmering soprano with enchanting stage presence, Heidi Grant Murphy is one of the outstanding vocal talents of her generation. She has appeared with many of the world's finest opera companies and symphony orchestras, notably the Metropolitan Opera, Salzburg Festival, Frankfurt Opera, Netherlands Opera, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Opera National de Paris and Santa Fe Opera. She has been engaged as soloist with the Vienna, New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics; Cleveland, Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras; and Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Houston, Montreal, National and Dallas Symphonies. Ms. Murphy has worked with such esteemed conductors as Roberto Abbado, Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph Eschenbach, James Levine, Reinbert de Leeuw, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Kent Nagano, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, Leonard Slatkin, Robert Spano, Jeffery Tate, Michael Tilson Thomas, Edo de Waart, Christoph Von Dohnányi, David Zinman, Bernard Haitink, Pinchas Zukerman and the late Robert Shaw.

Heidi Grant Murphy began the 2011-2012 season in Orff's Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero at the Mann Center, a performance she reprised at Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. In late July she visited the Sun Valley Summer Symphony festival for a recital of Debussy, Boulanger, and Chausson with her husband, pianist Kevin Murphy. Orchestral engagements see Ms. Murphy with the San Diego Symphony for Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, The Iris Orchestra for Mozart, Copland and Mahler, and with the Atlanta Symphony and Maestro Robert Spano for Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Ms. Murphy will also participate in the 2012 Cincinnati May Festival, singing Carmina Burana, Poulenc's Gloria and Carissimi's Jephte in three separate performances.

Heidi Grant Murphy's latest recording, Lullabies & Nightsongs, based on the children's book illustrated by Maurice Sendak, was released in September 2009 on Koch International. With Maestro Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic, Ms. Murphy appears on a live recording of Mahler IV and a separate recording of Augusta Read Thomas's Gathering Paradise on New World. Other notable recordings of Heidi Grant Murphy include Roberto Sierra's Missa Latina with baritone Nathaniel Webster and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on Naxos, Hansel and Gretel (Gretel) with Andreas Delfs and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, an XM Satellite Radio compilation of Sondheim classics, five additional discs for Koch and recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Arabesque and Delos. She can also be heard on the Grammy-nominated Sweeney Todd (Johanna) for the New York Philharmonic's private label.

In August 2011, Heidi Grant Murphy was appointed to the faculty of Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music as an adjunct professor of practice. She has been a featured guest on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, A&E's Breakfast with the Arts and BBC Radio 3. In October 2005, Ms. Murphy received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Western Washington University, where she pursued a bachelor's degree in music performance. Ms. Murphy resides in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband Kevin Murphy and their four children.

"Heidi Grant Murphy has one of those immaculate silvery, youthful voices that make the listener start with pleasure and scan the program to find her name." - New York Newsday

"Heidi Grant Murphy was a vocally exquisite and endearing Susanna. She is a lively musician and a perky actress." - The New York Times

"Heidi Grant Murphy's opening phrase alone was worth the price of admission: in control, in gracefulness, in ornamentation." - The New York Sun

Michael Stern founded the IRIS Orchestra in 2000, and holds the title of founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Under Stern's direction, IRIS has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Adam Schoenberg, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.

The 2009-10 season also marks Stern's fifth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim, and since then the orchestra has been hailed for its remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern have already made three recordings together; their latest disc, titled "Britten's Orchestra" was released in November of 2009 under the Reference Recordings label, and has glowing rave reviews.

In 2000 Stern concluded his tenure as chief conductor of Germany's Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first American chief conductor in the orchestra's history, he was offered the post almost immediately after making his debut with them in March 1996. In addition to their work in concert, for broadcast and tour Stern and the orchestra made several recordings of American repertoire, notably a disc of Henry Cowell's works, as well as a series devoted to the music of Charles Ives, including a live recorded performance of the "Universe" Symphony and their first recording of the "Emerson" piano concerto.

In September 1991, he was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, a position which he held for four years. He has also appeared with the national orchestras of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Last year, he bena a three year stint as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille. Elsewhere, Stern has led such orchestras as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Bergen Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, the Deutsche Symphoniker (DSO) in Berlin, the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. He has also been a frequent guest conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and has recorded both with that orchestra and with the London Philharmonic for Denton Records. In the United Kingdom, he has conducted the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony (London), and the English Chamber Orchestra. Stern has appeared in the Far East with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Singapore Symphony and Tokyo's NHK Symphony, and he has toured China with the Vienna Radio Symphony.

In North America, Michael Stern has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburg Symphony, New York Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among many others. He also appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival and has taught at American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. From 1986 to 1991, Stern was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In September 1986, he made his New York Philharmonic debut as one of three young conductors invited by Leonard Bernstein to participate in a conducting workshop that culminated in two concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

Stern received his degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his major teacher was the noted conductor and scholar Max Rudolf (whose famous textbook, "The Grammar of Conducting," Stern co-edited for its third edition). He also edited a new volume of Rudolf 's collected writings and correspondence, published by Pendragon Press. His studies have included two summers at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Hancock, Main, under the tutelage of Charles Bruck. Born in 1959, Michael Stern is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a degree in American History in 1981. He makes his home in Kansas City and in New York with his wife, Shelly Cryer, and their two daughters Hannon and Nora.