Concert first performed on June 8, 2019.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on May 4, 2019.
During their brief lifetimes, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, José Pablo Moncayo, and Franz Schubert all made lasting impacts on their unique cultural landscapes. While still a student at the University of Minnesota, Libby Larsen co-founded what would become the American Composers Forum. MPO’s Spring concert is a celebration of youthful inspiration, cultural diversity, and musical advocacy.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on March 9, 2019.
Dancing skeletons, hidden identities, musical innovations, and romantic virtuosity sound forth in the music of late 18th and early 19th-century French composers Augusta Holmés, Cesar Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, and Paul Dukas.
Lydia Artymiw, PianistThe recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Prize, Philadelphia-born Lydia Artymiw has performed with over one hundred orchestras world-wide including the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, National Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony, St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Solo recital tours have taken her to all major American cities and to important European music centers, and throughout the Far East. She has performed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, Finland, and Poland, as well as in China, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
Critics have acclaimed her seven solo recordings for the Chandos label, and she has also recorded for Bridge, Centaur, and Naxos. Her debut Chandos “Variations” CD won Gramophone Magazine’s “Best of the Year” award, and her Tchaikovsky Seasons CD sold over 25,000 copies. Her festival appearances include Alexandria, Aspen, Bantry (Ireland), Bay Chamber, Bravo! Vail Valley, Caramoor, Chamber Music Northwest, SaltBay, Chautauqua, Grand Canyon, Hollywood Bowl, Marlboro, Montreal, Mostly Mozart, Seattle, and Tucson. Her newest CD of the “Complete Cello and Piano Music by Felix Mendelssohn” with cellist Marcy Rosen was released on the Bridge label in April 2018 and is receiving enthusiastic reviews.
An acclaimed chamber musician, Artymiw has collaborated with such celebrated artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Stoltzman, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, Kim Kashkashian, Marcy Rosen, John Aler, Benita Valente, and the Guarneri, Tokyo, American, Alexander, Borromeo, Daedalus, Miami, Orion, and Shanghai Quartets, and has toured nationally with Music from Marlboro groups. A recipient of top prizes in the 1976 Leventritt and the 1978 Leeds International Competitions, she graduated from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and studied with distinguished concert pianist and former Director of the Curtis Institute of Music, Gary Graffman, for twelve years. In 2017, Artymiw was a juror for the Lang Lang Futian International Piano Competition in Shenzhen, China and in 2015, she was a juror for the first Van Cliburn Junior International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, TX, as well as on the juries for fifteen piano concerto competitions at the Juilliard and Manhattan Schools in New York. She has been a frequent guest piano teacher at Juilliard since 2015 and presented master classes at both Juilliard and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 2016.
She is Distinguished McKnight Professor of Piano at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where she has taught since 1989. In 2015 Artymiw was awarded the University of Minnesota’s “Excellence in Graduate Teaching” award. For more information, please visit her website at lydiaartymiw.com.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on November 3, 2018.
To begin the next 25 years of MPO history, we join forces with One Voice Mixed Chorus in a transcontinental program featuring Libby Larsen’s Fanfare for Humanity, Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, and opera choruses by Verdi and Copland.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on June 21, 2018.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on May 12, 2018.
MPO concludes its twenty-fifth season with a celebration and a bang! From the lively and raucous Overture to Candide by Leonard Bernstein to a quiet and contemplative Soliloquy by Jennifer Higdon (and featuring founding member Matthew Kruger on Clarinet), this concert is one you’ll remember for a long time.
MPO’s commitment to the performance of new music is evident as we unveil a premiere by Minnesota composer and MPO principal oboist Diane Benjamin. Following the intermission, you’ll be transfixed as MPO performs one of the giants of the orchestral repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s memorable and evocative Fifth Symphony. With this large symphony, we celebrate our community coming together throughout the years.
As Tchaikovsky stated: “If within yourself you find no reasons for joy, then look at others. Go among the people. See how they can enjoy themselves, surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to joyful feelings.”
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on March 10, 2018.
This concert highlights the musical voices of Czech and Slavic people as part of a broader exploration of the contributions of composers and their music to nationalism and identity. Libuše by Bedřich Smetana, depicts the origins of Prague and was premiered at the National Theatre.
Antonin Dvorak, the second prominent Czech to achieve worldwide recognition, wrote his hauntingly beautiful Slavonic Dance, Op. 46, No. 2, and his joyful and optimistic 8th symphony, basing them on Czech, Moravian, and other Slavic music. Additionally, Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 19 in B minor and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Danse nègre” from African Suite chronicle these composers’ respective contributions to Hungarian and African music.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
Concert first performed on November 18, 2017.
Stories from ballets, a play, and a prose poem form the backdrop for artistic director and principal conductor Brian Dowdy’s first concert with MPO. You’ll tap your feet to the sonorous folk tunes from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, a ballet that was forward thinking in terms of its depiction of gender roles.
Next, MPO offers a rarely performed tenor version of Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915 featuring Josh Diaz and profiling a young protagonist’s wistful and nostalgic adolescence.
Although Beethoven’s overture to Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s tragedy Coriolan is at times startling and violent, a secondary theme connotes reconciliation and redemption. And Tchaikovsky’s beloved music for Swan Lake tells of the eternal triumph of love over peevishness, sorcery, and parochialism.
Conducted by Brian Dowdy
