Program 4: Auerbach World Premiere
Auerbach: String Symphony
(Memoria de la luz)
World Premiere Commission
Wagner: Siegfried Idyll
Haydn: Symphony No. 45 “Farewell”
Tickets and Program Notes
Call 415.392.4400 (Mon-Fri 9:30am-5pm, Sat Noon-4pm) to purchase tickets by phone. Tickets are also available at the door beginning one hour prior to the performance.
$59 A Seating | $49 B Seating | $29 C Seating
ConcertsOpen Rehearsal
Tuesday 5/21/13 10AM, SF Conservatory
East Bay
Thursday 5/23/13 8PM, First Congregational Church
Peninsula
Friday 5/24/13 8pm, First United Methodist Church
San Francisco
Saturday 5/25/13 8pm, SF Conservatory
Marin
Sunday 5/26/13 5pm, Osher Marin JCC
The World Premiere of Lera Auerbach’s String Symphony (Memoria de la Luz) is made possible in part by the generosity of the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation.
Valet Parking
Pre-Paid Valet Parking is available beginning at 7:15pm on the night of each San Francisco concert. Purchase online or call 415.357.1111 x 4 by noon on the business day prior to the concert.
SF Conservatory 5/25/13
About the Concert
Characterized by its stylistic freedom and juxtaposition of tonal and atonal musical language, Featured Composer Lera Auerbach’s music has been praised for being “so skillfully constructed and so rich in imaginative beauty” (San Francisco Chronicle). New Century premieres Auerbach’s String Symphony (Memoria de la Luz) alongside Wagner’s romantic Siegfried Idyll, a tribute to the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth, and Haydn’s theatrical, touching “Farewell” Symphony.
Featured Composer
Russian-American composer and pianist Lera Auerbach is one of the most exciting new voices among today’s young composers. Auerbach’s music explores a wide range of forms and genres, from opera to chamber music. Also a prolific writer, she has published three volumes of poetry and prose, and writes her own librettos. Her ballet The Little Mermaid(choreography: John Neumeier) originally commissioned by Hamburg Ballett and the Royal Danish Ballet, has been performed over 100 times worldwide since its premiere in Copenhagen in 2005 and has just received its acclaimed US premiere with San Francisco Ballet. She has been commissioned by Vienna’s Theater an der Wien to write a full-length opera based on her own original play Gogol which was premiered in November 2011. Auerbach became Composer in Residence with the Staatskapelle Dresden from the beginning of the 2011/12 season. In October 2011, her full-length ballet Cinderella was premiered by the Finnish National Ballet and her a-capella-opera The Blind received its premiere at the Konzerthaus Berlin with the Berliner Kammeroper and Vocalconsort Berlin.
She has collaborated with the Flanders National Ballet, Antwerp, 2009 (11:11, choreography by Terence Kohler), Canada National Ballet in Toronto in 2009 (Watch Her, choreography by Aszur Barton), the China National Ballet, Beijing in 2010 (Take Your Time, choreography by Terence Kohler).
A virtuoso performer, Auerbach continues the great tradition of pianist-composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and appears regularly at renowned venues such as the Lincoln Center in New York, Symphony Hall Chicago, Moscow Conservatory, Tokyo Opera City and Herkulessaal München. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2002, performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica. Her music has been presented at Carnegie Hall each season since then. She also appears regularly at the Verbier Festival and has been Composer in Residence at the 2011 edition of the festival.
Lera Auerbach’s work has been performed by conductors such as Charles Dutoit, Andris Nelsons, Neeme Järvi and Andrey Boreyko and by orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic, Bamberger Symphoniker, and Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart. Her recently completed compositions include her Symphony No. 1, Chimera, which was commissioned and premiered by the Düsseldorf Symphoniker; Symphony No. 2,Requiem for a Poet, commissioned and premiered by the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover; A Russian Requiem co-commissioned by Musikfest Bremen, Philharmonische Gesellschaft Bremen and Semana de Musica Religiosa Cuenca and premiered by the Bremer Philharmoniker. She has been Composer-in-Residence at the Bremer Musikfest, at the 20th Anniversary Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, Lockenhaus Music Festival in Austria, Les Muséiques Festival in Basel, and with the Orchestra Ensemble Kanasawa in Japan. She has also written works for the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, Verbier Festival, Caramoor, Lucerne Festival and the Aspen Music Festival and has been Artist-in-Residence with the Deutschlandfunk.
She regularly collaborates with soloists and ensembles including Hilary Hahn, Vadim Gluzman, Leonidas Kavakos, Julian Rachlin, Philippe Quint, Gautier Capuçon, Alisa Weilerstein, David Finckel, Kim Kashkashian, Tokyo String Quartet, Borromeo String Quartet, Artemis String Quartet, Vanbrugh String Quartet, Kremerata Baltica, Camerata Pacifica, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Lera Auerbach was born in the city of Chelyabinsk, lying at the gateway to Siberia. After writing her first opera at twelve years of age, she moved to the USA in 1991 where she studied piano and composition at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School. In addition she attended classes in comparative literature at Columbia University. Her piano studies took her to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. She was awarded the prestigious Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany, Deutschlandfunk’s Förderpreis, selected as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and in 2007 she was selected as a member of the Young Global Leaders forum by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Lera Auerbach is the youngest composer on the roster of Hamburg’s prestigious international music publishing company Hans Sikorski.