LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Alan Gilbert - Conductor
Lang Lang - Piano

Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 17
Mozart - Overture to The Magic Flute
Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 24

Lang Lang Performs Mozart with Alan Gilbert and the NY Philharmonic Tonight

October 21

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Music Director Alan Gilbert will lead the New York Philharmonic in a one-night-only all- Mozart program featuring the Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 24, with Lang Lang as soloist, and Overture to The Magic Flute, tonight, October 21, 2014, at 7:30 p.m.

"Lang Lang brings a completely personal quality to everything he performs," Alan Gilbert has said. "Mozart's music is uniquely challenging to the performer -- it has to be stylish and shaped, but ultimately human -- but there's nothing more fun or gratifying. You have to tell the story of the music. The story of Mozart is everybody's story, and it's an important one."

Lang Lang has performed with the New York Philharmonic 82 times, including his Philharmonic debut in 2002.

Artists

Music Director Alan Gilbert began his New York Philharmonictenure in September 2009, the first native New Yorker in the post.  "The Philharmonic and its music director Alan Gilbert have turned themselves into a force of permanent revolution."

Repertoire

After Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) moved to Vienna in 1781, he earned much of his income through public concerts in which he played his own music. His popularity with Viennese concertgoers can thus be gauged from the number of piano concertos he wrote each year. The peak was in 1784, when he produced six new concertos, including the Piano Concerto No. 17, one of only six works in the genre published during the composer's lifetime .The concerto may not have actually been written for Mozart's own use, however, but rather at the request of Gottfried von Ployer for his daughter, Barbara (often called Babette) - one of the most engaging and cultivated members of Viennese society, and one of Mozart's most gifted pupils in both piano and composition. It is said that at that time Mozart had a pet starling who could whistle the first five measures of the concerto - though it is unknown which came first, the starling's talents or the concerto. Igor Stravinsky led the Philharmonic's first presentation of this concerto, with soloist Beveridge Webster, at Carnegie Hall in January 1937; Jeffrey Kahane performed and conducted the Orchestra's most recent presentation of the concerto in February 2006.

A freemason, Mozart completed his opera famously filled with Masonic symbolism, The Magic Flute, in 1791. Utilizing a libretto by fellow Mason Emanuel Schilkaneder, which drew upon popular German and Austrian fairy tales, the Singspiel (a popular style that featured both spoken dialogue and singing) follows Tamino and his traveling companion Papageno, who rescue the Pamina from the clutches of her evil mother, the Queen of the Night. Finished only a few days before the opera's premiere, the Overture is a wonderfully energetic preview of the adventure to come, weaving story and music together to form an unusually unified masterpiece. The Magic Flute was ultimately one of Mozart's greatest successes, but the composer died less than two months after its premiere at Schikaneder's Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, and the piece would be his final complete work. Ureli Corelli Hill, founding President of the Philharmonic Society of New York, conducted the Orchestra's first presentation of the Overture in November 1843 at the Apollo Rooms; its most recent performance was in April 2011, led by Alan Gilbert.

Mozart composed his Piano Concerto No. 24 in Vienna in 1786, barely a month before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro. It is widely considered to be among the composer's finest achievements, completed during one of his most creatively rich periods, when he was not only finishing Figaro but also working on several other pieces including Piano Concertos Nos. 22 and 23. The darkness of the Piano Concerto No. 24 and its minor key make it stand apart from its immediate predecessors, and it calls for the largest orchestra of his piano concertos, giving it a uniquely symphonic texture. It was premiered in April 1786 at Vienna's Burgtheater. The New York Philharmonic first performed this concerto in October 1944, with Robert Casadesus as soloist and Artur Rodzin?ski conducting, and most recently in March 2010, with Jeffrey Kahane leading from the keyboard.