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New Ballet by Adam Hendrickson


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From the publicist and Carnegie Hall:

NEW YORK CITY BALLET SOLOIST PREMIERES NEW BALLET AT YALE AND NEW YORK CITY

New York City Ballet soloist Adam Henrickson's new ballet will premiere at Yale's Sprague Memorial Hall on Feb. 8, 2010 at 8pm, and also will be presented at Carnegie Hall's Zankle Hall Feb. 9th, 2010 at 8pm as part of a program featuring pianist Boris Berman.

Hendrickson's ballet is part of a program that will feature recently discovered Prokofiev work, all played by pianist Boris Berman. The ballet was commissioned by Yale University's School of Music, and features dancers Elysia Dawn, Colby Damon and Matt Renko, with costumes by New York City Ballet principal, Janie Taylor. Hendrickson's last ballet, with music by Aaron Severini, was in 2008 as part of the New York City Dancer's Choice event.

OFFICIAL EVENT RELEASE BELOW

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tickets: 212/247-7800; www.carnegiehall.org

Yale in New York

David Shifrin, Artistic Director

presents

Prokofiev Rediscovered

Premieres and Rarities

Pianist and Prokofiev specialist Boris Berman joins the Yale School of Music's

exceptional students, alumni, and faculty in an all-Prokofiev program

Fragment from the opera Distant Seas (World Premiere)

Music for Athletic Exercises (New York Premiere) with original choreography by NYCB's Adam Hendrickson

Music for the ballet Trapeze (New York Premiere)

Schubert waltzes transcribed by Prokofiev for two pianos (seldom performed)

Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall

Tickets: $15, $20, $25; students $10, $15, $20

"For a grand tour through the total Prokofiev, I can't imagine a more observant or articulate guide than Boris Berman."

— New York Magazine

On Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m., the Yale School of Music continues its third annual Yale in New York series with Prokofiev Rediscovered. Boris Berman, the acclaimed pianist, Prokofiev specialist, and chairman of the Yale piano department, performs with gifted alumni, students, and faculty of the Yale School of Music in a program that features three premieres by one of the titans of 20th-century music.

Sergei Prokofiev was a prolific composer who wrote music in many genres. His piano sonatas are essential 20th-century keyboard repertoire, his concertos and symphonies are cornerstones for soloists and orchestras, and his operas and ballets continue to find their way onto the stages of the great companies. Prokofiev's fable Peter and the Wolf and Alexander Nevsky cantata are even familiar outside the music world. Yet for all this, there are still Prokofiev works that await discovery.

The Zankel Hall concert will showcase three recently discovered Prokofiev works: a fragment from the opera Distant Seas (1948) receives its world premiere, while Music for Athletic Exercises (1939) and the complete music from the ballet Trapeze (1924) will be heard in New York for the first time. In addition, Boris Berman will be joined by the dean of the Yale School of Music Robert Blocker in a rarely heard two-piano arrangement of a suite of Schubert waltzes.

Music for Athletic Exercises will be performed with choreography by the New York City Ballet's Adam Hendrickson. The New York Times has raved that Mr. Hendrickson "is just about invincible: understated, enigmatic and full of eccentricity. Mr. Hendrickson is unparalleled in City Ballet's canon of character parts."

The Yale School of Music is ideally suited to present music on the Prokofiev Rediscovered program. The program was created by Boris Berman, chairman of the Yale piano department and one of the world's most significant Prokofiev specialists. Berman is the founder of the Prokofiev Society of America, the first pianist to record all of the composer's solo works (Chandos), and the author of Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer (Yale University Press).

Yale in New York is the acclaimed series in which distinguished faculty—many of them famous soloists—share the limelight with exceptional alumni and students on Carnegie's stages, capturing the intense collaboration found on every level at the Yale School of Music. This past September showcased the classical legacy of Benny Goodman; upcoming concerts feature the undiscovered Prokofiev, Penderecki conducting Penderecki, and great voices from the famed Oral History of American Music project. The series is curated by David Shifrin.

Program Tidbits:

  • Music for Athletic Exercises (1939): Prokofiev was commissioned to write music to accompany one episode in a grand pageant staged in Red Square in Moscow, involving 30,000 athletes from all over the Soviet Union. The episode was supposed to be staged by the great director Vsevolod Meherhold, but he was arrested shortly before the performance and then executed on Stalin's orders. A facsimile of Prokofiev's piano score was published in 2004, and musicologist Simon Morrison's performing edition of the work will be heard for the first time in New York at this concert in Zankel Hall.
  • Fragment from the opera Distant Seas (1948): For many years, scholars were not sure just how much music from Prokofiev's 1948 uncompleted opera existed. The opera was Prokofiev's attempt at a light lyrical comedy on a contemporary Soviet subject. The composer intended to stay clear of anything that might seem politically controversial or problematic. Prokofiev abandoned the opera after two months, and the extant music has never been performed or recorded.
  • Music for the ballet Trapeze (1924): Writing for a small touring ballet company of Russian Romantic Theatre in Berlin, the composer was asked to use as small an instrumental force as possible. Prokofiev decided on a quintet composed of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and double bass. Six movements of the score became the well-known Quintet Op. 39, and two additional movements were later used by Prokofiev in his orchestral Divertimento Op. 43. Recently these two movements were restored to their original quintet form by musicologist Noelle Mann and published by Boosey and Hawkes as the eight-movement Trapeze.
  • Schubert waltzes transcribed for two pianos (1923): Prokofiev arranged this two-piano suite of Schubert waltzes for the same ballet company for which he composed Trapeze. It is a transcription of a one-piano suite of the Schubert waltzes Prokofiev compiled in 1919. Both versions are rarely performed; Berman recorded the one-piano version in his traversal of the complete Prokofiev piano works for Chandos.

Performers:

  • Music for Athletic Exercises (1939)
    Boris Berman, piano
    Dancers from The Hendrickson Dance Project (Elysia Dawn Fridkin, Matt Renko, Robert Colby Damon)
  • Fragment from the opera Distant Seas (1948)
    Elizabeth de Trejo, soprano ('01 MM)
    Baritone TBA
    Dann Coakwell, tenor ('11 MM [iSM])
    Rolando Sanz, ('02 MM, '03 AD)
    Boris Berman, piano
  • Music for the ballet Trapeze (1924)
    Stephen Taylor, oboe (Yale faculty)
    Emil Khudyev, clarinet ('11 MM)
    Marc Daniel van Biemen, violin ('10 MM)
    Ettore Causa, viola (Yale faculty)
    Aleksy Klyushnik, double bass ('11 MM)
  • Schubert waltzes transcribed for two pianos (1923)
    Robert Blocker and Boris Berman, pianos (Yale faculty)

[...]

For tickets, call 212/247-7800 or visit www.carnegiehall.org

THE YALE SCHOOL OF MUSIC

"Yale's bold New York venture will demonstrate the great variety and quality of music-making in the School of Music, illustrate Yale's great musical legacy, and draw attention to the University's unique scholarly resources."

— Robert Blocker, Dean, Yale School of Music

The Yale School of Music, established in 1894 and one of four graduate schools in the arts at the University, has a long tradition of leadership in the training of performers and composers. It is a graduate-professional school and the only school of music in the Ivy League. The school is highly selective, with approximately 200 students who come from the finest American and international conservatories and universities to study with a distinguished faculty. The school's alumni are found in major positions in virtually every sphere of music making and administration. Yale graduates perform in most of the major American symphony orchestras, and voice alumni have enjoyed great success in joining professional opera companies throughout the world, with over a dozen Yale graduates on the artist roster of the Metropolitan Opera. The list of composition alumni, faculty, and guest professors is a virtual Who's Who of the creators of new music of the past century. Along with artistic accomplishment, Yale School of Music graduates have demonstrated strong leadership in guiding the course of numerous academic and cultural institutions. The Yale School of Music engages in cooperative partnerships with several leading international conservatories and schools, including: the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing, China), Korean National University of the Arts-School of Music and Seoul National University-College of Music (Seoul, Korea), Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Russia), Royal Academy of Music (London), and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Budapest, Hungary). The Yale School of Music offers the Doctor of Musical Arts, Master of Musical Arts, and Master of Music degrees, as well as the Artist Diploma and the Certificate in Performance. In Fall 2005, the Yale School of Music received an unprecedented gift of $100 million, allowing the school to solidify its international position of leadership by expanding programs, renovating facilities, and offering full-tuition scholarships to all students.

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"Music for Athletic Exercises (1939): Prokofiev was commissioned to write music to accompany one episode in a grand pageant staged in Red Square in Moscow, involving 30,000 athletes from all over the Soviet Union. The episode was supposed to be staged by the great director Vsevolod Meherhold, but he was arrested shortly before the performance and then executed on Stalin's orders. A facsimile of Prokofiev's piano score was published in 2004, and musicologist Simon Morrison's performing edition of the work will be heard for the first time in New York at this concert in Zankel Hall."

Meyerhold? Wow.

Now I want to hear the score.

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