The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Lorin Maazel have been making music together for 50 years. They will celebrate this special anniversary with three concerts at Carnegie Hall in March, performing music by composers who have figured prominently in their half century of collaboration. These concerts feature works by Mozart, Sibelius, Eduard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Johann Strauss II, and Richard Strauss, as well as Maazel’s orchestral arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle, The Ring Without Words.
On Friday, March 2 at 8:00 p.m., Maestro Maazel conducts the orchestra in an all-Sibelius program including symphonies nos. 1, 5, and 7. The following evening, Saturday, March 3 at 8:00 p.m., they play Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor as well as Maazel’s The Ring Without Words arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle. They conclude their series on Sunday, March 4 at 2:00 p.m. with Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Der Rosenkavalier Suite along with music by Eduard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Johann Strauss II.
The March 3 concert will also be broadcast across the US and worldwide on Carnegie Hall Live—a radio broadcast and digital series which is a partnership of WQXR, Carnegie Hall, and American Public Media (APM). The concert will air live on WQXR 105.9 FM in New York and stream live at wqxr.org. The concert will also broadcast live in more than 35 markets across the nation, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, San Antonio, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and Austin, among others. A complete list of stations may be found here. For more information on this and the other Carnegie Hall Live broadcasts throughout the 2011–2012 season, please visit carnegiehall.org/wqxr.
For over five decades, Lorin Maazel has been one of the world’s most esteemed and sought-after conductors. Music Director of the New York Philharmonic from 2002 through 2009, he assumes the same post with the Munich Philharmonic at the start of the 2012–2013 season. Maestro Maazel founded and serves as artistic director of a festival based on his farm property in Virginia, the Castleton Festival. He is also a highly regarded composer, with a wide-ranging catalogue of works written primarily over the last dozen years. He has conducted more than 150 orchestras in no fewer than 5,000 opera and concert performances and has made over 300 recordings, including symphonic cycles or complete orchestral works of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Richard Strauss, winning ten Grands Prix du Disques. Mr. Maazel’s discography also includes a range of violin recordings. He is the recipient of two ASCAP awards for contributions to American music and has made appearances in every major music center and at every prominent festival internationally.
Maestro Maazel has been music director of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (1993 to 2002), music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony (1988–1996); general manager and chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera (1982–1984) — the first American to hold that position; music director of The Cleveland Orchestra (1972–1982); and artistic director and chief conductor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (1965–1971). He was named Honorary Member of the Israel Philharmonic in 1985 when he conducted its 40th Anniversary concert. He is also an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic, and is the recipient of the Hans von Bülow Silver Medal from the Berliner Philharmoniker. His close association with the Vienna Philharmonic includes 11 internationally televised New Year’s Concerts from Vienna (often with Maestro Maazel making an added contribution to the festivities as violinist).
There is perhaps no other musical ensemble more consistently and closely associated with the history and tradition of European classical music than the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In the course of its more than 160-year history, the musicians of this most prominent orchestra of the capital city of music have been an integral part of a musical epoch that must certainly be regarded as unique. Since its inception through Otto Nicolai in 1842, the fascination that the orchestra has exercised upon prominent composers and conductors, as well as on audiences all over the world, is based not only on a homogenous musical style carefully bequeathed from one generation to the next, but also on its unique structure and history. The desire to provide artistically worthy performances of the symphonic works of Mozart and Beethoven in their own city led to the decision on the part of the court opera musicians to present a “Philharmonic” concert series independent of their work at the opera, and upon their own responsibility and risk.
With concerts at home and on tour around the world, today’s Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is much more than Austria’s most coveted “cultural export.” The orchestra’s members are considered ambassadors, expressing through their performances the ideals of peace, humanity, and reconciliation with which music is so inseparably bound, and regularly donating services to create events that promote peace through music. Examples of this include the orchestra’s historic performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Sir Simon Rattle in 2000 at Mauthausen, the former site of Austria’s largest concentration camp during World War II; the 2002 concert in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in remembrance of victims of terrorism; annual benefits in New York City benefitting the American Austrian Foundation/Salzburg Cornell (Medical Seminars); and, beginning in 1999, an annual donation of 100,000 euros from the VPO’s New Year’s Concerts to a variety of humanitarian organizations. The Vienna Philharmonic, since 2005, has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the World Health Organization. As of November 2008, Rolex is the worldwide presenting sponsor of the Vienna Philharmonic.