World premierès by three young composers whose ages add up to just 92 and a salute to the 100th birthday of Elliott Carter led by another titan, Pierre Boulez, will highlight the 2008-09 season of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's highly popular MusicNOW series.
Derrick Hodge, 28 (left, above), and Gonzalo Grau, 35 (left, below), will each have new works on the season opening program November 10, along with two works from the 1980s, "Ziji" and "Raising the Gaze," by Peter Lieberson, winner of the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for Composition for Neruda Songs, to be played in Chicago and toured to Carnegie Hall by the CSO with Bernard Haitink and mezzo Kelley O'Connor next month.
Lieberson's wife and muse, the brilliant mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Liberson, died of breast cancer two years ago at 52. Lieberson, 61, is now battling lymphoma.
Hodge, of Philadelphia, has worked with filmmaker Spike Lee and trumpeter/film scorer Terence Blanchard. Venezuelan-born Grau has collaborated with CSO Mead Composer-in-Residence Osvaldo Golijov on two of Golijov's most popular works, La Pasión según San Marcos and Ainadamar. Another young artist, French conductor Ludovic Morlot, will lead the concert.
CSO conductor emeritus Boulez, 83 (left), will lead a salute to his friend Carter (far left) on March 2, 2009, including Carter's 1975 song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, setting poems by Elizabeth Bishop, with a soprano to be announced. Carter, who is composing more actively than ever, turns 100 this December. The Boulez program also includes a short 2006 work, "Streets," by the Frenchman Bruno Montovani, 33, and the Berlin-based Swiss Hanspeter Kyburz's "Réseaux" (2003-2007).
MusicNOW principal conductor Cliff Colnot will direct a January 12 program in conjunction with the CSO's "Echoes of Nations" season-long theme with recent works from Portugal, by Luis Tinoco, Australia, by Brett Dean, and Germany, by Heiner Goebbels, as well as American Lee Hyla's 2007 Polish Folk Songs.
And the series will conclude June 8 with a world première by laptopper Jeremy Flower, 29 (left, with "friend"), another member of the Golijov posse; a U.S. première of a new work by Mead Composer-in-Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage for 12 brass players; and Golijov's 1999 Mariel in the version for cello and marimba with young CSO stars Kenneth Olsen, assistant principal cello, and Cynthia Yeh, principal percussion. (The CSO will have performed the version for cello and orchestra with conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya as a part of its "Inca Trail" concerts in October.) Michael Ward-Bergeman, Golijov's regular hyper-accordionist, rounds the program out with his "Thee Roads."
MusicNOW concerts, now in their 11th year, are booked for Monday nights and take place at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Subscriptions and tickets: (312) 294-3000 or www.cso.org.
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