For Immediate
Release
April 10,
2014
PITTSBURGH
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND BNY MELLON GRAND CLASSICS CELEBRATE LIFE AND WORKS OF
MOZART
Festival,
led by Music Director Manfred Honeck, opens April 25 and closes May
4
PITTSBURGH — Each of Wolfgang Amadé
Mozart’s vast number of compositions is considered a musical gem. Join Music
Director Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as they celebrate
Mozart’s extensive catalog of masterpieces during the BNY Mellon Grand Classics
Mozart Festival, a two-week exploration of the five pillars of Mozart’s music —
symphony, concerto, chamber music, opera and sacred music.
The
opening weekend of the festival, April 25-27, features celebrated Mozart scholar
and pianist Robert Levin, who will join the Pittsburgh Symphony in performing
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, a favorite
concerto of Beethoven’s.
Opening weekend concert times are 8
p.m. on Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26 and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, April
27. Music of Mozart at the Carnegie Music Hall is at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April
29. The Mozart Festival finale weekend features concerts at 8 p.m. on Friday,
May 2 and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 4. Tickets for the opening and closing
weekends, ranging in price from $25.75 to $105.75, can be purchased by calling
the Heinz Hall box office at 412-392-4900 or by visiting pittsburghsymphony.org.
Tickets, $15-$35, for Music of Mozart can be purchased at
pittsburghchambermusic.org or 412-624-4129.
The Pittsburgh Symphony would like
to recognize and thank BNY Mellon for its 2013-2014 title sponsorship of BNY
Mellon Grand Classics. Fairmont Pittsburgh is the official hotel of the
Pittsburgh Symphony. Delta Air Lines is the official airline of the Pittsburgh
Symphony.
 |
| Noah Bendix-Bagley |
Noah
Bendix-Balgley is a laureate of
the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and also won third prize and a
special prize for creativity at the 2008 Long-Thibaud International Competition
in Paris. Bendix-Balgley won the first prize at the 2011 Vibrarte International
Music Competition in Paris and was awarded first Prize and a special prize for
best Bach interpretation at the 14th International Violin Competition “Andrea
Postacchini” in Fermo, Italy. As a soloist, he has performed with the Pittsburgh
Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre
National de Belgique, I Pomeriggi Musicale of Milan, Orchestre Royal Chambre de
Wallonie (Belgium), the Binghamton Philharmonic and the Asheville Symphony
(USA). In 2011, Bendix-Balgley was appointed concertmaster of the Pittsburgh
Symphony Orchestra. His Pittsburgh debut recital in January 2012 was named the
“Best Classical Concert of 2012” by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Bendix-Balgley has also performed his own version of “The Star-Spangled
Banner” for solo violin in front of 39,000 fans at the Pittsburgh Pirates
Opening Day at PNC Park. He is a passionate and experienced chamber musician and
has performed on North American tour with the Miro String Quartet. From 2008 to
2011, he was the 1st violinist of the Munich-based Athlos String Quartet, which
won a special prize at the 2009 Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Competition in
Berlin, and performed throughout Europe. Bendix-Balgley has appeared at numerous
festivals in Europe and North America, including the Verbier Festival, Sarasota
Festival, ChamberFest Cleveland, Brevard Music Center, and Chamber Music
Connects the World in Kronberg, Germany. Bendix-Balgley graduated from
the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the Munich Hochschule. He is a
part of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music as an artist
lecturer and coaches several student string
quartets.
 |
| William Caballero |
William
Caballero has been principal
horn for the Pittsburgh Symphony for 25 years. Before joining the Pittsburgh
Symphony in May 1989, Caballero previously held principal horn positions with
the Houston Symphony, Houston Grand Opera and Hartford Symphony. He held third
horn positions with the Montreal Symphony, Montreal Opera and acting third horn
with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops. He has also performed as guest
principal horn with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and
the St. Louis Symphony. Born in New Mexico and reared in Wisconsin, Caballero’s
early horn studies included working under Larry Simons, Barry Benjamin and Basil
Tyler, as well as studying the piano and pipe organ. Caballero graduated from
New England Conservatory in Boston where he studied with Richard Mackey and
Thomas Newell, both former members of the Boston Symphony. Currently, Caballero
is the associate teaching professor of horn at Carnegie Mellon University School
of Music. Previously, he held teaching positions at Indiana University
Bloomington, Rice University in Houston, Texas and Duquesne University. He has
been invited and presented master classes throughout the world including
Northwestern University, Colburn School of Music, New England Conservatory,
University of Indiana Bloomington, Cleveland Institute of Music, Curtis
Institute of Music, Manhattan School of Music, New World Symphony and the
Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories. The past two summers he joined the faculty
of the Aspen Music Festival as performer and teacher. For the previous seven
summers, Caballero was on the faculty and performed at the Pacific Music
Festival in Sapporo, Japan.
In January 2012, Caballero began collaboration
with the Internet music teaching company ArtistWorks.com based in Napa,
California. He holds the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Anonymous Foundation Principal
Horn Chair.
 |
| Manfred Honeck |
Manfred
Honeck was appointed the
ninth music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in January 2007, and
began his tenure at the start of the 2008-2009 season. After a first extension
in 2009, his contract was
extended for the second time in February 2012, now through the 2019-2020
season. Honeck was
born in Austria and studied music at the Academy of Music in Vienna. An
accomplished violinist and violist, he spent more than 10 years as a member of
the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. He began his
career as conductor of Vienna's Jeunesse Orchestra, which he co-founded, and as
assistant to Claudio Abbado at the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in Vienna. In
2010, Honeck was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Vincent College in
Latrobe, Pa. Apart from his numerous tasks as conductor, he has been artistic
director of the “International Concerts Wolfegg” in Germany for more than 15
years. Honeck served as principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic
Orchestra from 2008 to 2011, a position he has resumed for another three years
at the beginning of the 2013-2014 season. As a guest conductor, Honeck has
worked with major orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Bavarian
Radio Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin,
Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Israel
Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic and in the United States with
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
National Symphony Orchestra Washington and Boston Symphony Orchestra. Manfred
Honeck's successful work with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is now captured
by Reference Recordings. The first SACD — of Strauss tone poems — was released
in fall 2013 and received rave reviews. Several additional recordings are
completed and it is expected that two releases will be issued per
year.
At the beginning
of the 2013-2014 season, soprano Sunhae Im was seen as Dorinda in a new
staging of Handel’s
 |
| Sunhae Im |
“Orlando” in Rennes, Brest, Versailles and at the Théâtre du
Capitole de Toulouse. Further engagements took her to Amsterdam and Rotterdam
(Brahms: “Requiem”); to France (Mozart: “Requiem” under Laurence Equilbey); to
Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Crakow (Handel: “La Resurrezione”); to the Kölner
Philharmonie and the Salle Pleyel in Paris (Handel: “Orlando”); and to the
Wiener Musikverein and the Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels (Bach:
“Weihnachtsoratorium”). In Berlin, she did a Christmas program with the Deutsche
Symphony Orchestra. Since her European stage debut in 2000, South Korean Im—who
studied at the Seoul National University under the guidance of Lokyung Pak and
at the University of Karlsruhe under Roland Hermann—has proven her artistic
versatility in a multitude of international productions. She has been a guest at
the Berliner Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Oper Frankfurt, the Staatsoper
Hamburg, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Opéra National de Paris (Euridice in
Gluck’s “Orfeo” under Thomas Hengelbrock), the Staatstheater Stuttgart (Ilia in
“Idomeneo,” Susanna in “Le Nozze di Figaro” and Constance in Poulenc’s
“Dialogues des Carmélites” under Manfred Honeck), the Korean National Opera
(Adina in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Ilia under Myung-Whun Chung), the
Budapest Palace of Arts (Zerlina in “Don Giovanni” under Iván Fischer), and the
Theater an der Wien (“La Finta Giardiniera” and “L’Orfeo”). Im has been invited
to renowned festivals such as the Edinburgh International Festival, Mostly
Mozart Festival, Salzburg Festival and Haydn International Festival and has
worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the
Munich Philharmonic. She has worked with conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe,
William Christie, Fabio Biondi, Thomas Hengelbrock, Herbert Blomstedt, Frans
Brüggen, Giovanni Antonini, Iván Fischer, Kent Nagano, Riccardo Chailly, Lothar
Zagrosek, Sylvain Cambreling, Ton Koopman, Marek Janowski and René Jacobs. She
also has close ties to the ensembles of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
(AKAMUS), as well as the Freiburger Barockorchester. Her repertoire includes
works by Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Gluck, Rameau, Charpentier, Mozart, Haydn,
Schubert, Mahler and Mendelssohn.
 |
| Sunhae Im |
Pianist and
conductor Robert Levin has been heard throughout the United States,
Europe, Australia and Asia. His solo engagements include the orchestras of
Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Montreal, Utah and Vienna on the Steinway with such conductors as Semyon
Bychkov, James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir
Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. On period pianos, he has appeared with the
Academy of Ancient Music, English Baroque Soloists, Handel & Haydn Society,
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et
Romantique. Renowned for his improvised embellishments and cadenzas in Classical
period repertoire, Levin has recorded a Mozart concerto cycle for Decca; a
Beethoven concerto cycle for DG Archiv (including the world premiere recording
of Beethoven’s arrangement of the Fourth Concerto for piano and string quintet);
and the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling. A passionate
advocate of new music, Levin has commissioned and premiered a large number of
works. He is a renowned chamber musician and a noted theorist and musicologist.
His completions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf
& Härtel, Carus, Peters and Wiener Urtext Edition, and recorded and
performed throughout the world.
 |
| Donald Marinelli picture courtesy Carnegie Mellon |
Donald Marinelli
retired from
Carnegie Mellon University in April 2012, concluding 31 years of service to the
university in a variety of capacities. Together with the late computer science
professor Randy Pausch, Marinelli co-founded the world-renowned Carnegie
Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. Marinelli also was a tenured professor
of drama and arts management at CMU. Marinelli was integral in the creation of
the Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Arts Management program, the Master
of Fine Arts in Acting degree program with the Moscow Art Theatre School in
Russia, and the Master of Entertainment Technology degree program within the
ETC. He is currently executive vice president of Vissman Management, a merger,
acquisition and venture capital firm based in Pittsburgh. He is an adjunct
professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and the School of Arts, Media and
Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. A native of Brooklyn,
N.Y., Marinelli completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Tampa.
He received a M.A. in clinical psychology, specializing in
existential-phenomenological psychology from Duquesne University. Marinelli
subsequently attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received his Ph.D.
in theatre history, literature and criticism in 1987.
 |
| Michael Rusinek |
Michael
Rusinek
joined the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in fall 1998 as principal clarinet.
Born in Toronto, Canada, his early studies were with Avrahm Galper at the Royal
Conservatory of Music. He later attended The Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia. Upon graduation, he was appointed by Mstislav Rostropovich to the
post of assistant principal clarinet with the National Symphony Orchestra in
Washington, D.C. In addition to his position in the Pittsburgh Symphony, he has
performed as guest principal clarinet with the National Arts Center Orchestra of
Canada, the St. Louis Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and The Royal
Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Rusinek has
performed as a soloist with many orchestras and as a recitalist across Canada,
on CBC Radio, and throughout the United States and Israel, including appearances
with the Czech Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Belgrade Philharmonic, Royal
Conservatory of Music Orchestra, National Symphony, Aspen Chamber Symphony, the
Grand Teton Music Festival, and the Symphony Orchestra of The Curtis Institute
of Music. Dedicated to teaching, he has led master classes at some of the
leading institutions around the country, including The Curtis Institute, the
Manhattan School of Music and the New World Symphony. He served on the faculty
of the Canton International Summer Music Academy in Canton, China, for its
inaugural season, and returns often to play and teach in Tianjin and Beijing. He
also has served on the faculty of Instrumenta Verano in Mexico. He is currently
on faculty at the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon
University.
 |
| Anne Martindale Williams |
Anne Martindale
Williams has enjoyed a
successful career as principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
since 1979. Throughout her tenure with the orchestra, she has often been
featured as soloist both in Pittsburgh and on tour in New York at Carnegie Hall
and Avery Fisher Hall. She has collaborated with guest artists such as Yehudi
Menuhin, André Previn, the Emerson Quartet, Lynn Harrell, Joshua Bell, Gil
Shaham and Pinchas Zukerman in numerous chamber music performances. She made her
London debut performing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic,
Andre Previn conducting. Williams divides her time between the orchestra,
teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, and solo and chamber music performances
in America, Europe and the Far East.
Editors Please
Note:
MOZART FESTIVAL
OPENS
Friday, April 25
at 8 p.m.
Saturday, April 26
at 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 27
at 2:30 p.m.
Heinz
Hall
PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
BNY MELLON GRAND
CLASSICS
MANFRED HONECK, conductor
WILLIAM CABALLERO,
horn
ROBERT LEVIN,
piano
Wolfgang Amadé
Mozart Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525
I. Allegro
II. Romance:
Andante
III. Menuetto:
Allegretto
IV. Rondo: Allegro
Concerto No. 20 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra, K. 466
I. Allegro
II. Romanza
III. Rondo:
Allegro assai
Solo Improvisation
á là Mozart
Concerto No. 1 in
D major for Horn and Orchestra, K. 386b [412] (completed and edited by Robert.
D. Levin)
I. Allegro
II. Allegro
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, "Jupiter"
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante
cantabile
III. Allegretto
IV. Molto allegro
MUSIC OF
MOZART
Tuesday, April 29
at 7:30 p.m.
Carnegie Music
Hall in Oakland
CHAMBER MUSIC PITTSBURGH
PITTSBURGH
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
MICHAEL RUSINEK,
clarinet
NOAH
BENDIX-BALGLEY, violin
CHRISTOPHER WU,
violin
MENG WANG,
viola
ANNE MARTINDALE
WILLIAMS, cello
ROBERT LEVIN,
piano
Wolfgang Amadé
Mozart First movement of a Violin Sonata in G major KV Anh.
47/546a*
Fantasy in C minor KV 396 (385f)*
First movement from a Violin
Sonata in B-flat major KV372/KV Anh. 49*
*Mozart fragments
completed by Harvard scholar and Classical period keyboard expert Robert
Levin
Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
MAD ABOUT
MOZART
Friday, May 2 at 8
p.m.
Sunday, May 4 at
2:30 p.m.
Heinz
Hall
PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
BNY MELLON GRAND
CLASSICS
MANFRED HONECK, conductor
SUNHAE IM,
soprano
LUCAS MEACHEM,
baritone
MENDELSSOHN CHOIR
OF PITTSBURGH (Betsy Burleigh, director)
DON MARINELLI,
host
Wolfgang Amadé
Mozart Mass in c minor,
K. 417a
I. Kyrie
Laudamus
te
Vesperae
solennes de confessore, K. 339
Laudate
Dominum
Alleluia
from Exsultate, jubilate, K. 158a (165)
Ave Verum
Corpus, K.
618
Requiem in
d minor, K. 626
Dies
Irae
Confutatis
Lacrimosa
Overture
to Don Giovanni, K. 527
“Finch’ han dal
vino“ (Champagne Aria) from Don Giovanni
“Deh vieni alla
finestra,” Canzonetta from Don Giovanni
“Giovinette, che
fate alla amore,” Duet and Chorus from Don Giovanni
“Là ci darem la
mano” from Don Giovanni
Overture to
The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492
“Non più andrai”
from The Marriage of Figaro
“Porgi, amor”
Cavatina from The Marriage of Figaro
“Hai già
vinto…Vedrò mentr'io sospiro” from The Marriage of
Figaro
Overture to The
Magic Flute, K. 620
“Ein Mädchen oder
Weibchen” from The Magic Flute
“O Isis und
Osiris,” Chorus of the Priests from The Magic Flute
Papageno's Suicide
Scene and Duet, “Papageno! Papagena!”
from The Magic
Flute
Final Chorus from
The Magic Flute
###
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