Fabio Luisi Returns to Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony, Tours with Danish National Symphony & Philharmonia Zurich This Winter and Spring

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Fabio Luisi Returns to Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony, Tours with Danish National Symphony & Philharmonia Zurich This Winter and Spring

This winter and spring, Grammy and ECHO Klassik Award-winning conductor Fabio Luisi looks forward to several high-profile guest conducting appearances, including return engagements with the Philadelphia Orchestra – to help celebrate “André Watts’s 60-Year Legacy” – and the San Francisco Symphony, as well as a return to conduct two different programs with the London Symphony. He also tours California with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (DNSO), of which he is the newly appointed Principal Conductor, with concerts featuring beloved soprano Deborah Voigt; and tours Europe with Philharmonia Zurich and special guest Anne-Sophie Mutter. Rounding out the conductor’s busy season are concerts with Japan’s NHK Symphony in Tokyo; returns to Filarmonica della Scala and the Munich Philharmonic; and a concert at Florence’s Opera di Firenze, where Luisi assumes the post of Music Director starting in the spring of 2018.

André Watts made his precocious debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of 10 in 1957, and has since played with the orchestra over 100 times. Celebrating the 60th anniversary of that first appearance, Luisi returns to the podium in Philadelphia to conduct Watts in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, along with Weber’s Overture to Oberon and Franck’s Symphony in D minor. Later in the spring Luisi reunites with another storied orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, conducting three performances of Strauss’s tone poem Aus Italien along with Schumann’s Piano Concerto, featuring young Russian pianist Igor Levit as soloist. Levit also joins Luisi as he returns to the London Symphony this spring, for the first time since his “powerful and convincing” (The Guardian) 2014 debut. Their concert pairs Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Brahms’s Second Symphony, and three days later Luisi leads the LSO in a different program: Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony along with Brahms’s towering German Requiem, joined by the London Symphony Chorus under the direction of Simon Halsey.

Now in his first season as Principal Conductor of the DNSO, Luisi has chosen to focus with the orchestra on Mahler’s symphonic works. He conducted the Ninth Symphony for the DNSO’s season-opening concerts last fall, and in the coming months he returns to Copenhagen for Mahler’s Seventh and First (“Titan”) Symphonies. The latter program also includes Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, featuring soprano Deborah Voigt, who Luisi conducted as Brünnhilde in Robert LePage’s 2011 Ring Cycle at the Met. Following the Copenhagen concerts they will tour the program to five cities in California, culminating with two dates in San Francisco. Opening those concerts is the Helios Overture by Carl Nielsen, whose music has already garnered raves for both the orchestra and Luisi. Nielsen’s Second (“The Four Temperaments”) Symphony “in Luisi’s hands, was a riot of invention” (London Evening Standard) when the DNSO performed the piece under his direction at the BBC Proms.

Philharmonia Zurich, the resident orchestra of Zurich Opera where Luisi is currently in his fifth season as General Music Director, plays concerts this spring under his direction both in Zurich and on tour throughout Germany and Luxembourg. The performances feature the music of Bruch, Brahms and Takemitsu, with four-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter as guest soloist.

The 2016-17 season marks Luisi’s sixth and last as Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. Typical of the consistently favorable press generated by that tenure was a Huffington Post review of the new Richard Eyre staging of Manon Lescaut last season, specially praising the music “which the magnificent Met Orchestra renders so beautifully under Fabio Luisi’s brilliant baton.” Earlier this season Luisi took the podium at the Met for an all-star Don Giovanni, before conducting a new Pierre Audi production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, which returned to the house after an 80-year absence. Starring baritone Gerald Finley as Tell, along with Marina Rebeka and Bryan Hymel, the production again garnered raves for the conductor. The Financial Times noted that he “conducted, as usual, with unflappable savoir-faire”; Vulture.com marveled at how Luisi “keeps it all in exquisite equilibrium”; the New York Times praised the “insight and adroit technique” with which he drew “fleetness, breadth and refinement from the excellent Met orchestra”; and the Wall Street Journal found that his “vivid, idiomatic conducting did the most to weld the long evening together.”

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Fabio Luisi: winter-spring 2017 engagements

Feb 2, 3, 4

Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia Orchestra

André Watts’s 60-Year Legacy”

Weber: Overture to Oberon

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 (André Watts, piano)

Franck: Symphony in D minor

Feb 16

Copenhagen, Denmark

Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Abrahamsen: Four pieces

Mahler: Symphony No. 7

Feb 17

Copenhagen, Denmark

Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Abrahamsen: Four pieces

Mahler: Symphony No. 7

Feb 20

Milan, Italy

Filarmonica della Scala

Strauss: Don Juan

Liszt: Concerto No. 2

Strauss: Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40

Feb 25

Florence, Italy

Opera di Firenze

Nielsen: Hymnus Amoris, Op. 12

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy in C minor, Op. 80

Strauss: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64

March 2, 4

Munich, Germany

Munich Philharmonic

Webern: Sechs Stücke für Orchester, Op. 6

Mahler: Symphony No. 9

March 6, 7

Munich, Germany

Munich Philharmonic

Schumann: Symphony No. 1

Brahms: Symphony No. 4

March 16

London, UK

London Symphony Orchestra

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor” (Igor Levit, piano)

Brahms: Symphony No. 2

March 19

London, UK

London Symphony Orchestra

London Symphony Chorus / Simon Halsey

Schubert: Symphony No. 8, “Unfinished”

Brahms: A German Requiem

March 23

Copenhagen, Denmark

Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Soloist: Deborah Voigt, soprano

Nielsen: Helios Overture

Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder

Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D, “Titan”

March 28-April 3

California, USA

Danish National Symphony Orchestra

March 28: Santa Barbara

March 29: Palm Desert

March 30: San Diego

March 31: Costa Mesa

April 2, 3: San Francisco

April 15, 16

Tokyo, Japan

NHK Symphony Orchestra

Einem: Capriccio, Op. 2 (1943)

Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (Nikolaj Znaider, violin)

Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D, “Titan”

April 21, 22

Tokyo, Japan

NHK Symphony Orchestra

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 15 (Beatrice Rana, piano)

Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor

April 27, 28, 29

San Francisco, CA

San Francisco Symphony

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor (Igor Levit, piano)

Strauss: Aus Italien

May 12-23

Philharmonia Zurich tour with Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin

Takemitsu: Nostalghia–In Memory of Andrei Tarkovsky

Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26

Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98

May 12: Stuttgart, Germany

May 14: Zurich, Switzerland

May 16, 17: Linz, Germany

May 18: Dresden, Germany

May 20: Essen, Germany

May 21: Köln, Germany

May 22: Luxembourg, Luxembourg

May 23: Frankfurt, Germany

# # #

© 21C Media Group, January 2017

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