FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 23, 2015
Contact: Katherine E. Johnson
(212) 875-5718; johnsonk@nyphil.org
ALAN GILBERT AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence ERIC OWENS To Perform
Richard STRAUSS Songs and Final Scene from Act III of WAGNER’s Die Walküre
With Soprano HEIDI MELTON in Her Philharmonic Debut
Program Also To Include WAGNER’s Ride of the Valkyries and SIBELIUS’s En saga
Saturday Matinee Concert To Feature Grieg’s String Quartet
Performed by Philharmonic Musicians
January 7–9 and 12, 2016
Bass-baritone Eric Owens will continue his tenure as The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-inResidence with performances, led by Music Director Alan Gilbert, of Richard Strauss songs —
“Ruhe, meine Seele,” Op. 27, No. 1; “Cäcilie,” Op. 27, No. 2; “Pilgers Morgenlied,” Op. 33,
No. 4 — and the Final Scene from Act III of Die Walküre, alongside soprano Heidi Melton in
her Philharmonic debut. The program also includes Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and
Sibelius’s En saga, one of several programs this season honoring the 150th anniversary of
Sibelius’s birth. The performances take place Thursday, January 7, 2016, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday,
January 8 at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, January 9 at 8:00 p.m.; and Tuesday, January 12 at 7:30 p.m.
These performances mark Mr. Owens’s first time singing Wotan in New York. He has been
widely acclaimed for his mastery of the German Romantic repertoire, including his celebrated
performance as Alberich in The Metropolitan Opera’s 2012 production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
These Philharmonic performances precede Mr. Owens’s appearances as Wotan in Lyric Opera of
Chicago’s upcoming Ring Cycle, beginning in the 2016–17 season.
“Eric is the quintessential Wotan,” Alan Gilbert said. “His voice is perfect for the role, and he
can bring out its complexity — its heroism, but also its vulnerability. Performing it without
staging can be a challenge, but Eric’s singing is so expressive that he will bring the character to
life through his voice alone. In this he will be helped by the Philharmonic musicians, who can
play Wagner’s technically difficult passages not only with flair but also with amazing tonal
depth. Conducting Wagner with this Orchestra is more than a dream-come-true; they have a
quintessential way with his music.”
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The Saturday Matinee Concert on January 9 at 2:00 p.m. opens with Grieg’s String Quartet, with
Philharmonic Concertmaster Frank Huang, Principal Associate Concertmaster Sheryl Staples,
Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps, and Principal Cello Carter Brey. The rest of the program features
Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4, conducted by Alan Gilbert.
Related Events
 Philharmonic Free Fridays
The New York Philharmonic is offering 100 free tickets for young people ages 13–26 to the
concert Friday, January 8 as part of Philharmonic Free Fridays. Information is available at
nyphil.org/freefridays. Philharmonic Free Fridays offers 100 free tickets to 13–26-year-olds
to each of the 2015–16 season’s 15 Friday evening subscription concerts.
 Pre-Concert Insights
Writer, music historian, and former Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York
Philharmonic Harvey Sachs will introduce the program. Pre-Concert Insights are $7, and
discounts are available for three (3) or more talks and for students. They take place one hour
before these performances in the Helen Hull Room, unless otherwise noted. Attendance is
limited to 90 people. Information: nyphil.org/preconcert or (212) 875-5656.
Artists
Music Director Alan Gilbert began his New York Philharmonic tenure in 2009, the first native
New Yorker in the post. He and the Philharmonic have introduced the positions of The MarieJosée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, and
Artist-in-Association; CONTACT!, the new-music series; NY PHIL BIENNIAL, an exploration
of today’s music; and New York Philharmonic Global Academy, collaborations with partners
worldwide offering training of pre-professional musicians, often alongside performance
residencies. As The New Yorker wrote, “Gilbert has made an indelible mark on the orchestra’s
history and that of the city itself.”
Alan Gilbert’s 2015–16 Philharmonic highlights include R. Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben to
welcome Concertmaster Frank Huang; Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala; and five World
Premieres. He co-curates and conducts in the second NY PHIL BIENNIAL and performs violin
in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. He leads the Orchestra as part of the Shanghai
Orchestra Academy Residency and Partnership and appears at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy
of the West. Philharmonic-tenure highlights include acclaimed stagings of Ligeti’s Le Grand
Macabre, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd starring Bryn
Terfel and Emma Thompson (for which Mr. Gilbert was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for
Outstanding Music Direction), and Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake starring Marion
Cotillard; 24 World Premieres; The Nielsen Project, a performance and recording cycle; Verdi
Requiem and Bach’s B-minor Mass; the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey alongside the film;
Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony on the tenth anniversary of 9/11; and nine tours around the
world. In August 2015 he led the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the U.S. Stage Premiere of
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, co-presented as part of the Lincoln Center–New York
Philharmonic Opera Initiative.
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Conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest
conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra, Alan Gilbert regularly conducts leading
orchestras around the world. This season Mr. Gilbert makes debuts with four great European
orchestras — Filarmonica della Scala, Dresden Staatskapelle, London Symphony, and Academy
of St Martin in the Fields — and returns to The Cleveland Orchestra and Tokyo Metropolitan
Symphony Orchestra. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut conducting John
Adams’s Doctor Atomic in 2008, the DVD of which received a Grammy Award. Renée
Fleming’s recent Decca recording Poèmes, on which he conducted, received a 2013 Grammy
Award. His recordings have received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone
magazine. Mr. Gilbert is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at The Juilliard School,
where he holds the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies. His honors include an Honorary
Doctor of Music degree from The Curtis Institute of Music (2010), Columbia University’s
Ditson Conductor’s Award for his “exceptional commitment to the performance of works by
American composers and to contemporary music” (2011), election to The American Academy of
Arts & Sciences (2014), and a Foreign Policy Association Medal for his commitment to cultural
diplomacy (2015).
As the 2015–16 Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic,
bass-baritone Eric Owens appears as soloist throughout the season, and is expanding the role of
the Philharmonic’s Artist-in-Residence by curating programs and participating in educational
activities. Mr. Owens’s 2015–16 season features orchestral engagements including performances
of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the St. Louis Symphony, led by Markus Stenz, and with
the Minnesota Orchestra, led by Osmo Vänskä; Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges with the
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen; Brahms’s A German Requiem
with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by Mr. Stenz; and Dvořák’s Stabat Mater with The
Cleveland Orchestra, led by Franz Welser-Möst. He will also join Music of the Baroque as
Simon in concert performances of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus conducted by Jane Glover.
Operatic highlights of Mr. Owens’s season include his return to The Metropolitan Opera as Orest
in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by
Esa-Pekka Salonen, which will be broadcast on the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning Live in
HD series to movie theaters around the world, and he will host The Met’s Live in HD broadcast
of Verdi’s Otello. He returns to Santa Fe Opera for his role debut as La Roche in a new
production of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio directed by Tim Albery, and to Washington National
Opera as Stephen Kumalo in Weill’s Lost in the Stars. At the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C., he will perform an evening of jazz standards featuring the music of Billy Eckstine and
Johnny Hartman, and he will also appear in recital under the auspices of the McCarter Theatre,
Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, Oberlin College and Conservatory, Troy
Chromatic Concerts, and Curtis Institute of Music. Eric Owens made his New York
Philharmonic debut in June 2003 singing selections from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, led by
then Philharmonic Music Director Lorin Maazel, during the Orchestra’s residency at Sardinia’s
Teatro Lirico di Cagliari. He will have most recently appeared with the Philharmonic in
December 2015 in Oh, What Fun! A Philharmonic Holiday, performing “You’re a Mean One,
Mr. Grinch.”
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Alan Gilbert / Eric Owens / Heidi Melton / 4
In the 2015–16 season dramatic soprano Heidi Melton makes her Vienna Philharmonic debut
singing Brünnhilde’s “Immolation Scene” from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, conducted by
Valery Gergiev, at Vienna’s Musikverein and Carnegie Hall. She will sing Sieglinde in concert
performances of Wagner’s Die Walküre with the Hong Kong Philharmonic led by Jaap van
Zweden, to be recorded by Naxos, and returns to Deutsche Oper Berlin as Venus/Elisabeth in
Wagner’s Tannhäuser, with Donald Runnicles, and to Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe for her
first performances as Isolde in a new Christopher Alden production of Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde, conducted by Justin Brown. Ms. Melton then makes her English National Opera debut in
a new production of Tristan and Isolde conducted by Edward Gardner. Notable symphonic
engagements include her Italian debut conducted by Kirill Petrenko with Sinfonica Nazionale
della RAI in Torino as Gutrune/Third Norn in a concert performance of Götterdämmerung; BBC
Proms as Elisabeth in a concert performance of Tannhäuser with Donald Runnicles and the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra; Dallas Symphony led by Jaap van Zweden, BBC Scottish
Symphony with Donald Runnicles, and Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Kent Nagano in Act
One of Die Walküre; the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Act I of Die Walküre and Isolde’s
“Liebestod” under Marin Alsop and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs with Markus Stenz; the
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Jan van Gilse’s Eine Lebensmesse; the Festival de
Lanaudière as Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin under Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Orchestre
Métropolitain; the Aspen Music Festival and Robert Spano in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8,
Symphony of a Thousand; Real Filharmonía de Galicia in Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder
conducted by Paul Daniel; and the Verdi Requiem for Donald Runnicles’s farewell concert as
music director of San Francisco Opera. These performances mark Heidi Melton’s New York
Philharmonic debut.
Repertoire
The great Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, became a consuming passion and source of
inspiration to Jean Sibelius (1865–1967) throughout his life, and the tone poem En saga was the
first Kalevala-based piece Sibelius would compose. He said later of the work, “En saga is the
expression of a state of mind. I had undergone a number of painful experiences at the time and in
no other work have I revealed myself so completely. It is for this reason that I find all literary
explanations quite alien.” Composed at the behest of conductor Robert Kajanus, En saga
(Swedish for “a legend”) was written during the summer and fall of 1892, and Sibelius
conducted the first performance early the following year. The version performed today is a
revision created for a performance at Ferruccio Busoni’s concert of new music in Berlin in 1902.
This work was first performed the Philharmonic on January 1, 1931, led by Arturo Toscanini.
The Philharmonic’s most recent performance of this work was in December 2004, led by Colin
Davis.
Two of the three selected Richard Strauss (1864–1949) songs presented in this program are
from a set of four that he composed in 1894, all presented as a wedding gift to his wife, soprano
Pauline de Ahna, when they married that September. Strauss originally composed the quartet of
songs for voice and piano, and finally orchestrated them in 1948. The title of first, “Ruhe, meine
Seele!,” Op. 27, No. 1, means “Rest, my soul!” and is based on a poem by Karl Henckell.
“Cäcilie,” Op. 27, No. 2, is the second in the set, and takes its text from a poem by Heinreich
Hart that was written for his wife, the Cäcilie of the title. The third song, “Pilgers Morgenlied,”
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Alan Gilbert / Eric Owens / Heidi Melton / 5
Op. 33, No. 4 (or “Pilgrim’s Morning Song”), composed in 1896–97, is one of the composer’s
few settings of Goethe. The writer had dedicated this poem to Luise Henriette von Ziegler,
whom he met in Darmstadt in 1772 and was a lady-in-waiting at court and one of the “sensitive
souls” Goethe met in the city. The Philharmonic first performed “Ruhe, meine Seele” in
September 1995, featuring Jessye Norman and conducted by Kurt Masur; most recently,
Christoph Eschenbach led Barbara Bonney in the song in March 2001. The New York
Symphony (a forebear of the New York Philharmonic) presented “Cäcille” for the first time in
November 1904 by Etta De Montjau, conducted by Walter Damrosch; Renée Fleming was the
Philharmonic’s most recent soloist for the piece, led by Kurt Masur in September 1997. Richard
Strauss himself led David Scull Bispham in the Philharmonic’s first presentation of “Pilgers
Mogenlied” in March 1904; Mr. Bispham was also soloist for the only other Philharmonic
performances of the work, in February 1911, led by Gustav Mahler.
Die Walküre is the second opera in Richard Wagner’s (1813–83) Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Wagner wrote the libretto himself and based the work on the Norse mythology, the Volsunga
Saga and Poetic Edda. Act III of Die Walküre begins with what is possibly the best known
excerpt from this opera: Ride of the Valkyries, the instrumental prelude that builds until four of
the eight Valkyries gather to pay tribute to Valhalla’s fallen. As the act progresses, Valkyrie
Brünnhilde arrives with the human Sieglinde (pregnant with Siegmund’s child, Siegfried), and
asks her sisters to help protect the woman, but they refuse; Sieglinde flees before the arrival of a
wrathful Wotan (king of the gods and father of Brünnhilde). In the final scene from Act III,
Wotan punishes Brünnhilde by making her mortal, placing her on a mountain in magical sleep
surrounded by a circle of flame. Theodore Thomas conducted the Philharmonic’s first
presentation of Ride of the Valkyries in November 1879; the most recent performance was in
May 2015 as part of Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, conducted by George Daugherty. The
Orchestra first performed the final scene from Act III in April 1879, led by Adolph Neuendorff;
it was most recently performed in April 1982, led by Zubin Mehta with soloist Peter Wimberger.
***
Eric Owens is The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence.
***
Major support for Philharmonic Free Fridays is provided by The Pratt Foundation.
***
Philharmonic Free Fridays was created, in part, by a donation from an anonymous donor through
the New York Philharmonic’s 2014 Share the Music! campaign.
***
Programs are supported, in part, by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural
Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the
New York State Legislature.
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Alan Gilbert / Eric Owens / Heidi Melton / 6
Tickets
Single tickets for this performance start at $29. Pre-Concert Insights are $7 (visit
nyphil.org/preconcert for more information). Tickets may be purchased online at nyphil.org or
by calling (212) 875-5656, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday; 1:00 p.m. to 6:00
p.m. Saturday; and noon to 5:00 p.m. Sunday. Tickets may also be purchased at the David
Geffen Hall Box Office. The Box Office opens at 10:00 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and at
noon on Sunday. On performance evenings, the Box Office closes one-half hour after
performance time; other evenings it closes at 6:00 p.m. A limited number of $16 tickets for select
concerts may be available through the Internet for students within 10 days of the performance, or
in person the day of. Valid identification is required. To determine ticket availability, call the
Philharmonic’s Customer Relations Department at (212) 875-5656. (Ticket prices subject to
change.)
For press tickets, call Lanore Carr at the New York Philharmonic at (212) 875-5714, or email her
at carrl@nyphil.org.
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Alan Gilbert / Eric Owens / Heidi Melton / 7
New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center
Thursday, January 7, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
Open Rehearsal — 9:45 a.m.
Friday, January 8, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, January 9, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
Pre-Concert Insights (one hour before each concert) with writer, music historian, and former
Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic Harvey Sachs
Alan Gilbert, conductor
Heidi Melton*, soprano
Eric Owens, bass-baritone
SIBELIUS
R. STRAUSS
WAGNER
En saga
“Ruhe, meine Seele,” Op. 27, No. 1
“Cäcilie,” Op. 27, No. 2
“Pilgers Morgenlied,” Op. 33, No. 4
Ride of the Valkyries and Final Scene from
Act III of Die Walküre
SATURDAY MATINEE CONCERT
David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center
Saturday, January 9, 2016, 2:00 p.m.
Alan Gilbert, conductor
Frank Huang, Sheryl Staples, violin
Cynthia Phelps, viola
Carter Brey, cello
GRIEG
SIBELIUS
String Quartet
Symphony No. 4
###
ALL PROGRAMS SUBJECT TO CHANGE
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