CSO Partners with Apple Music Classical and Releases Two New Recordings Led by Music Director Louis Langrée
David Lang’s man made Featuring Sō Percussion and Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 6, Commissioned in Celebration of the Orchestra’s 125th Anniversary Season
Available Exclusively on Apple Music and Apple Music Classical September 15
CINCINNATI, OH (August 22, 2023)—The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s audio recordings of David Lang’s man made, a concerto written for the percussion quartet Sō Percussion, and Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 6, commissioned by the Orchestra for its 125th anniversary, will be available beginning on Friday, September 15, 2023 exclusively on Apple Music, home to one of the world’s largest catalog of music. The recordings, both led by Music Director Louis Langrée, were recorded in Dolby Atmos spatial audio, which provides listeners with an immersive 3D listening experience. They are the Orchestra’s first full-orchestra Fanfare Cincinnati releases since its Grammy-nominated Transatlantic album in 2019, adding to more than 200 commercial albums released by the Orchestra since 1917.
David Lang’s man made was recorded on September 25, 2021 at Cincinnati Music Hall and represents the second time the Orchestra has recorded a work by Lang, the first being the world premiere of mountain on the Orchestra’s 2014 album Hallowed Ground, Langrée’s first recording of his tenure with the CSO. Lang’s man made features the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra led by Langrée and the Orchestra’s 2015 and 2021 MusicNOW collaborators Sō Percussion, an ensemble that has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker).
Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 6 was recorded on September 30 and October 2, 2022 at Music Hall. The Orchestra commissioned the piece for its 125th anniversary in 2019 and gave the world premiere shortly after Rouse’s passing. Symphony No. 6 is Rouse’s final completed work.
Both released in Langrée’s final season as Music Director of the Orchestra, the albums are also a tribute to his transformational impact on the Orchestra during his 11-year tenure. By the conclusion of Langrée’s tenure, he will have appointed between a third and a half of the CSO’s musicians, including the hiring of Stefani Matsuo as the Orchestra’ first female Concertmaster, commissioned 65 new works, and conducted 27 world premieres. The addition of these new recordings pay homage to Langrée’s legacy while adding to the Orchestra’s extensive commissioning and recording history.
“Commissioning and championing new music have been a vital part of my musical mission since I first came to Cincinnati, and collaborating with the CSO on our bold and boundary-pushing programming has been one of the great joys of my time here,” said Langrée. “The audience's receptiveness and willingness to follow us on this journey, and the extraordinary performances and recordings that have come out as the result of it, leave a legacy that we can all be proud of – and these two works are no exception. With these recordings, we are breathing new life into this important music.”
APPLE MUSIC CLASSICAL
Apple Music Classical was designed to offer the listening experience that classical music lovers deserve and had never had. A team of engineers and musicologists worked for over seven years, resulting in an app with over 50 million data points which enables listeners to access the largest streaming catalogue of classical music available anywhere. Over five million tracks, 120,000+ works, 400,000+ movements and 20,000+ composers are all available in the highest audio quality with thousands of albums in immersive Spatial Audio.
Apple Music Classical is the ultimate classical experience with hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, intuitive browsing features and much more.
Apple Music subscribers can download and enjoy the Apple Music Classical app as part of their existing subscription at no additional cost.
LOUIS LANGRÉE
In the 2023-24 season, Louis Langrée celebrates his final season with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he has been Music Director since 2013, and he continues as Director of Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris, an appointment that began in November 2021. Langrée ended his 20-year tenure as Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in the summer of 2023. Two of his Cincinnati recordings were Grammy nominated for Best Orchestral Performance: Transatlantic, with works by Varèse, Gershwin and Stravinsky; and Concertos for Orchestra, featuring world premieres by Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich and Zhou Tian. On stage, his Pelléas et Mélisande trilogy contrasted settings by Fauré, Debussy and Schoenberg. A multi-season Beethoven [R]evolution cycle paired the symphonies with world premieres, as well as recreation of the legendary 1808 Akademie. During the Covid pandemic, Langrée was a catalyst for the Orchestra’s return to the stage in the fall of 2020 with a series of digitally streamed concerts.
Between the start of his tenure and the conclusion of the CSO’s 2023–24 season, Langrée and the CSO will have commissioned 45 new orchestral works and he will have conducted 31 premieres from a wide range of composers, including Julia Adolphe, Daníel Bjarnason, Jennifer Higdon, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Kinds of Kings, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, André Previn, Caroline Shaw and Julia Wolfe, and the world premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 6, Rouse’s final opus.
He has guest conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Orchestre National de France and Leipzig Gewandhaus, as well as Orchestre des Champs-Elysées and Freiburg Baroque. He frequently conducts at the leading opera houses, including more than 50 performances at The Metropolitan Opera and engagements with Vienna Staatsoper, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Bavarian Staatsoper, and at festivals including Glyndebourne, Aix-en-Provence, BBC Proms, Edinburgh International and Hong Kong Arts.
A native of Alsace, France, he is a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and he is an Honorary Member of the Confrérie Saint-Étienne d’Alsace, an Alsatian wine-makers’ brotherhood dating to the 14th century.
CINCINNATI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
With a legacy dating back 128 years, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) is considered one of America’s finest and most versatile ensembles. Led by Louis Langrée since 2013, the CSO’s distinguished roster of past music directors includes Leopold Stokowski, Eugène Ysaÿe, Fritz Reiner, Max Rudolf, Jesús López Cobos and Paavo Järvi. Matthias Pintscher is the Orchestra’s Creative Partner; previous artistic partners have included Lang Lang, Philip Glass, Branford Marsalis and Jennifer Higdon. The Orchestra also performs as the Cincinnati Pops, founded by Erich Kunzel in 1977 and currently led by John Morris Russell with Damon Gupton serving as Principal Guest Conductor. The CSO further elevates the city’s vibrant arts scene by serving as the official orchestra for the Cincinnati May Festival, Cincinnati Opera and Cincinnati Ballet.
The CSO has long championed the composers and music of its time and has given historic American premieres of works by Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, William Grant Still and other prominent composers. It has also commissioned many works that ultimately became mainstays of the classical repertoire, including Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The Orchestra continues to actively commission new work, amplifying new voices from a diverse array of backgrounds, most recently with the Fanfare Project, a series of solo instrument works written for CSO musicians to mark a moment in time during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Deeply committed to inclusion, relevance, and enhancing and expanding opportunities for the children of Greater Cincinnati, the Orchestra works to bring music education, in its many different forms, to as broad a public as possible. These efforts include two youth orchestras, the Nouveau program, Sound Discoveries, Musicians in Schools, the CSO Brass Institute, and one of the longest running Young People’s Concerts series in the U.S., which has run for over 100 years.
In 2020, the CSO was one of the first American orchestras to create a Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer position; in 2022, the CSO became the first American orchestra to endow the position to ensure the absorption of best DE&I practices into every facet of the organization in perpetuity. The CSO/CCM Diversity Fellowship, a nationally recognized program in partnership with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, provides a graduate degree-level education with performance and professional development opportunities for extraordinary young string players from populations historically underrepresented in American orchestras. The CSO is also an incubator for and partner to Equity Arc, a consortium of American orchestras, professional musicians and educators established to address the lack of racial equity in the classical music field by aligning resources and collaborating to strengthen the trajectory of classical instrumentalists of color at all stages of their pre-careers.
Lang's man made and Rouse's Symphony No. 6 will be available on additional streaming platforms, including Spotify, Presto Music, IDAGIO, TIDAL, and more beginning October 13. For more information, visit cincinnatisymphony.org.