Louis Langrée, Music Director, Louise Dieterle Nippert & Louis Nippert Chair

Louis Langrée has been Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) since 2013 and Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center since 2003.

Langrée, known for imaginative programs, began his CSO tenure with Jennifer Higdon’s On a Wire with Eighth Blackbird, Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, narrated by Maya Angelou and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Two of his recordings with the CSO were Grammy-nominated in the Best Orchestral Performance category: Transatlantic, with works by Varèse, Gershwin, and Stravinsky; and Concertos for Orchestra, featuring world premieres by Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich, and Zhou Tian. His Pelléas et Mélisande trilogy contrasted settings by Fauré, Debussy, and Schoenberg. A multi-season Beethoven Revolution cycle paired the symphonies with world premieres and 20^th-century masterworks, culminating with a recreation of the legendary 1808 Akademie.

A regular presence at Lincoln Center since his 1998 debut, Langrée has conducted around 250 concerts and productions, including more than 50 Metropolitan Opera performances; has taught Juilliard School masterclasses; appeared with the CSO as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series; and made his New York Philharmonic guest conducting debut in March, 2020. Langrée has raised the artistic profile and repertoire of the Festival Orchestra well beyond the classical period, from Lully to Magnus Lindberg.

An advocate for the music of our time, Langrée has conducted premieres by Julia Adolphe, Daníel Bjarnason, Anna Clyne, Jonathan Bailey Holland, David Lang, Nico Muhly, André Previn, Caroline Shaw, and Julia Wolfe among numerous others including, with the CSO, the world premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 6, the composer’s final opus. Among the many period-instrument ensembles he has worked with are the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Freiburg Baroque, Concerto Köln, and Orchestre des Champs-Elysées.

Louis Langrée has guest conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, NHK Symphony, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, and Leipzig Gewandhaus among others. In addition to the Met, he frequently conducts at the leading opera houses including the 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 the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Langrée was previously music director of the Orchestre de Picardie, Opéra National de Lyon, Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, and chief conductor of the Camerata Salzburg. A native of Alsace, France, he is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

INSIGHTS
from Music Director Louis Langrée

Welcome to Music Hall! Last month, the concerts I conducted were the CSO’s very first with a live audience in Music Hall—with you!—in 11 months. How special, how irreplaceable it is. Experiencing music together in real time is profound, beautiful and essential, and sharing it with you, the audience, gives it meaning.

We are continuing to explore music that demonstrates our collective culture, the high level of playing from our musicians, and the CSO’s long legacy of collaboration with living composers. All four composers represented on this program have spent time with the Orchestra, interacting, performing, conducting, and even premiering, pieces with us. And, all four share a common thread: whether or not these compositions reflect it, each of these composers was heavily influenced by jazz and other pop culture and was interested in how the language of jazz could be juxtaposed with classical music.

The first time I heard Milhaud’s La création du monde was in 1976 with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Orchestre National de France at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Originally written as a ballet, the piece had premiered at the same concert hall 50 years earlier, in 1923, on a program that included Within the Quota by Cole Porter. I was fascinated by how Milhaud mixed jazz elements with his own bitonal language. Incidentally, Milhaud has a strong Cincinnati connection: the CSO commissioned him to write one of the 1942–43 fanfares.

I had the opportunity to meet Anthony Davis in Cincinnati last fall and was taken by his music and by him as a person. After performing his powerful clarinet concerto, You Have the Right to Remain Silent, we wanted to delve more deeply into his work and started searching other pieces by him. The musical language of Litany of Sins sounds completely different from the style we experienced from him in the fall. Thirty years after its premiere, we perform this week its second-ever performance.

John Adams has a long history with the CSO; he made his debut in April 1997, conducting more than 10 concerts, and has spoken very highly about the Orchestra and our “very informed and musically sophisticated community.” When Adams began work on his Chamber Symphony he used as a model Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1, with almost the same instrumentation. During that process, his son was in the next room binging cartoons. Adams found himself drawn to what he calls the “hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores” of the cartoons, realizing that it had a lot in common with Schoenberg’s music. Adams describes this piece as “at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic,” adding that it is “shockingly difficult to play.” Indeed, this incredibly challenging work will showcase the extraordinary talent and virtuosity of our musicians.

We conclude this concert with a short masterpiece by Leonard Bernstein, probably the most iconic American music figure of the 20th century. A musical omnivore with an insatiable appetite, he wrote in a wide range of genres and styles. Prelude, Fugue and Riffs was composed for big band in 1949 and is a distillation of his compositional skills and language. The prelude for brass is a loose form that Bernstein navigates in his own unique way and the fugue for saxophones shows his ability to infuse himself in this highly rigorous form in any style. An almost manic, high-octane riff ends the piece, adding a solo clarinet and piano to the whole group!

LOUIS LANGRÉE has been Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra since 2013. His two most recent CSO recordings, Transatlantic and Concertos for Orchestra, were Grammy-nominated for Best Orchestral Performance, and several of his other recordings have received awards, including Gramophone, Diapason d’Or and International Classical Music awards. He is also Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, and is invited as a guest conductor by the most prestigious orchestras and opera houses, including the Berlin, Vienna, London, Tokyo and New York Philharmonic orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera, Vienna State Opera, La Scala, Royal Opera House Covent Garden.

Christopher Pell, Principal Clarinet, Emma Margaret & Irving D. Goldman Chair

Christopher Pell is the Principal Clarinetist of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the second clarinetist of The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and the former principal clarinetist of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Pell has performed as principal clarinetist with the Toronto Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, The Knights, Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería (Mexico City) and Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra; second clarinet with the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra; and a variety of positions with American Ballet Theatre. He appeared as a soloist with the Louisiana Philharmonic, Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, U.S. Army Band at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, and Long Island Sound Symphony. He has also won first prize in the Vandoren Emerging Artists Competition. As a chamber musician, Pell has performed with the Linton Chamber Music Series, Concert Nova, the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, Twickenham Fest, Lyrica Baroque, the Orlando Chamber Soloists, the Luzerne Chamber Music Festival, NOLA 360, and the Lake George Music Festival. Pell teaches at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and he has taught at the Interlochen Arts Camp and the University of New Orleans. Christopher Pell graduated from The Juilliard School in 2013 and has twice been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. He is a Buffet Crampon artist and a Vandoren artist. These concerts are his CSO subscription debut as a featured soloist.

DARIUS MILHAUD
La création du monde (“The Creation of the World”), Op. 81

The French composer Darius Milhaud (b. September 4, 1892, Marseilles, France; d. June 22, 1974, Geneva) already had a fascination for jazz before he traveled to New York City in 1922, where he immersed himself in many jazz genres and styles. Shortly after, in 1923, Milhaud composed La création du monde (“The Creation of the World”) for the Ballet suédois, a Swedish dance company based in Paris. The piece is based on a scenario by the Swiss poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars on an African creation myth. Darius Milhaud adapted the instrumentation for his new work from Maceo Pinkard’s show Liza, of which Milhaud was fond.

ANTHONY DAVIS
Litany of Sins

Anthony Davis (b. February 20, 1951, Paterson, NJ) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who joined us in the fall for the performance of his clarinet concerto, You Have the Right to Remain Silent. Litany of Sins was commissioned by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, which premiered the piece on June 2, 1992, in New York City. It has been described as “graceful yet energetic with a provocative sense of underlying restlessness” (New York Post). A showcase for Davis’ storytelling skills, Litany of Sins is structured in three movements, each with its own distinctive character.

JOHN ADAMS
Chamber Symphony

John Adams (b. February 15, 1947, Worcester, MA) wrote his Chamber Symphony between September and December of 1992. The piece was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the American premiere on April 12, 1993. The Schoenberg Ensemble had given the world premiere of the piece in January of that year in the Netherlands. Adams’ Chamber Symphony is inspired by Schoenberg’s piece of the same title, and the two works share roughly the same instrumentation, although Adams adds synthesizer, a trap set, trumpet and trombone. Adams describes his take on the Chamber Symphony through this analogy, saying, “…the busy, hyperactive style of Schoenberg’s own early work is placed in a salad spinner with Hollywood cartoon music.”

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (original jazz version)

Leonard Bernstein (b. August 25, 1918, Lawrence, MA; d. October 14, 1990, New York) completed his original version of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, for solo clarinet and jazz ensemble, in 1949, with subsequent revisions in 1952, 1955 and 1963. It was originally written for Woody Herman and his Thundering Herd big band, but Herman never performed the work, likely because his ensemble had disbanded before the piece was completed. The piece lay filed away until, on October 16, 1955, Bernstein again revised the work and led the ABC-TV Studio Band in the world premiere on his Omnibus television program, for an episode titled “The World of Jazz.” Al Gallodoro played the clarinet solo at the premiere. As Malcolm MacDonald wrote in his preface to Volume 2 of the anthology of the composer’s music, “The title proclaims the marriage of concert music and jazz, the Baroque form of the Prelude and the Fugue being complemented by a series of riffs (in jazz parlance, a riff is a short, repeated melodic figure).”

DARIUS MILHAUD
La création du monde (“The Creation of the World”), Op. 81

Born: Sept. 4, 1892, Marseilles, France
Died: June 22, 1974, Geneva

Composition History: Milhaud composed La création du monde (“The Creation of the World”) in 1923, for the Ballet suédois in Paris. The company gave the work’s premiere in 1923 in Paris.

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, (incl. piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, alto saxophone, bassoon, horn, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, bass drum with pedal, cowbell, crash cymbals, snare drum, tambour de Basque, tambourin Provençal, tenor drum, wood block, piano, 2 violins, cello, bass

CSO Subscription Performances: The CSO has performed La création du monde once before on a subscription weekend, in March 1970 with Erich Kunzel conducting.

ANTHONY DAVIS
Litany of Sins

Born: Feb. 20, 1951, Paterson, NJ

Composition History: Davis composed Litany of Sins in 1992 and the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble gave the premiere on June 2, 1992 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City.

Instrumentation: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, harp, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass

CSO Subscription Performances: These performances are the work’s CSO premiere.

JOHN ADAMS
Chamber Symphony

Born: Feb. 15, 1947, Worcester, MA

Composition History: Adams wrote Chamber Symphony between September and December of 1992. The piece was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the American premiere on April 12, 1993. The work’s world premiere was given in the Netherlands by the Schoenberg Ensemble in January 1993.

Instrumentation: flute (incl. piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets (incl. E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), horn, trumpet, trombone, drum set, synthesizer, violin, viola, cello, bass

CSO Subscription Performances: These performances are the work’s CSO premiere.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (original jazz version)

Born: Aug. 25, 1918, Lawrence, MA
Died: Oct. 14, 1990, New York

Composition History: Bernstein completed the original jazz version of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, for solo clarinet and jazz ensemble, in 1949, with revisions in 1952 (for his musical Wonderful Town; cut from the final score), 1955 and 1963. It was originally written for Woody Herman and his Thundering Herd big band, but Herman never performed the work, likely because his ensemble had disbanded before the piece was completed. The piece lay filed away until, on October 16, 1955, Bernstein again revised the work and led the ABC-TV Studio Band in the world premiere on his Omnibus radio program. Al Gallodoro played the clarinet solo at the premiere.

Instrumentation: solo clarinet, 2 alto saxophones, 2 tenor saxophones, baritone saxophone, 5 trumpets, 4 trombones, timpani, tom-toms, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone, drum set, piano, bass

CSO Subscription Performances: The CSO performed the original jazz version of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs once before on a subscription weekend, in April 2006 with Paavo Järvi conducting, Richard Hawley, clarinetist and Wayne Marshall, pianist. The CSO also performed the full orchestra version under Jesús López Cobos, in January 2000 at Music Hall, and on its subsequent East Coast Tour, including at Carnegie Hall; clarinetist Richard Stoltzman was the soloist. (Stoltzman had given the 1997 world premiere of the orchestral version of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, arranged by Lukas Foss.)