Events & Tickets

Orchestra Concert
BEETHOVEN AND STRAUSS
Adrienne Arsht Center
6:00 - 7:00 PM: Complimentary beer tasting from Concrete Beach Brewery, and happy hour specials in the atrium
6:00 – 7:45 PM: pop-up performances in the atrium
7:00 - 7:30 PM: Musicians from Guitars Over Guns perform on the stage of the Knight Concert Hall
8:00 PM: New World Symphony concert
Program
NWS Fellows offer an electrifying evening in this season’s final performance at the Adrienne Arsht Center. Cristian Măcelaru, a University of Miami Frost School of Music graduate and new Chief Conductor of Cologne’s WDR Symphony Orchestra, commands the podium in Richard Strauss’ Don Juan. Brimming with passion, this heroic tone poem reframes the famed heartbreaker’s pursuits. Performing together for over four decades, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio combines three acclaimed solo artists into one dynamite performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. The thrilling frenzy of George Enescu’s virtuosic First Romanian Rhapsody is grounded in the folk and gypsy traditions of his homeland, while J.S. Bach’s celebrated Ricercar undergoes an inventive reimagining in Anton Webern’s arrangement for chamber orchestra.
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Program
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685-1750)
Orchestrated by Anton Webern
Approx. Duration: 8 minutes
Ricercar No. 2 from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
(1747)
Richard Strauss
(1864-1949)
Approx. Duration: 17 minutes
Don Juan, Op. 20
(1888)
George Enescu
(1881-1955)
Approx. Duration: 11 minutes
Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A major, Op. 11
(1901)
Intermission
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Approx. Duration: 33 minutes
Concerto in C major for Piano, Violin, Cello and Orchestra, Op. 56, "Triple Concerto"
(1803)
Allegro
Largo
Rondo alla polacca
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio
Johann Sebastian Bach
Ricercar No. 2 from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
(1747)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes
King Frederick II of Prussia, a.k.a. “Frederick the Great,” was a committed patron of the arts and a talented flutist and composer himself. He hired Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to be his court’s main keyboard player (and his go-to chamber music partner), and he equipped him with the finest new instruments, including a fortepiano built by Gottfried Silbermann. When Bach’s father Johann Sebastian came to visit Potsdam in 1747, he tested out that cutting-edge keyboard instrument at a concert, improvising a fugue on the spot after the king presented him with an original theme.
J. S. Bach took that “royal theme” back home to Leipzig and used it to generate a collection of canons, fugues and other movements grouped together as The Musical Offering, which he dedicated to Frederick. Besides the three-part fugue born out of the improvisation, Bach wrote another contrapuntal treatment for six voices, labeling both selections “Ricercar.” (From the Italian “to seek out,” the term first applied to the early Baroque polyphony that preceded fugues.) Bach wrote this Ricercar with each part on its own staff, but he did not specify the instrumentation.
Nearly 200 years later, a publisher commissioned an arrangement of the six-voice Ricercar from Anton Webern, a protégé of Schoenberg who distilled his teacher’s atonal techniques to their utmost concentration and clarity. Just as in his own compositions, Webern deconstructed Bach’s fugue through the process known as Klangfarbenmelodie (“tone-color-melody”), in which a continuous musical line breaks into small fragments with distinctive tone colors. The first statement of the fugue’s subject, for instance, passes the single line among muted trombone, horn and trumpet, reinforced with a few flecks of harp. Even amid the most tangled counterpoint, the surgical precision of Webern’s orchestration magnifies the wonder of Bach’s fugue and the endless possibilities he found in the king’s serpentine theme.
Richard Strauss
Don Juan, Op. 20
(1888)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes
Richard Strauss began his musical life with conservative tastes, taking after his father (the great horn player Franz Strauss) in a preference for the Classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It was only once Strauss left home that his ears opened up to the “music of the future,” to quote a phrase associated with his new musical idol, Richard Wagner. In time, Strauss would inherit Wagner’s mantle as the king of forward-thinking opera, thanks to works like Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). But first he followed another progressive icon, Franz Liszt, into the realm of the symphonic poem, an orchestral genre of musical storytelling. Strauss’ first true “tone poem, ” to use his preferred label, was Macbeth (1888), but it was the subsequent tone poem, Don Juan, that earned the 25-year-old Strauss a permanent place in the highest echelon of German composers.
Strauss came to know the story of Don Juan—or Don Giovanni in Italian—through Mozart’s opera. The Spanish writer Tirso de Molina published the first known version around 1630 under the title El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest), but the story had been in oral circulation for some time before that printed edition. Strauss modeled his tone poem on a particular version of the legend concocted by the Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850).
Strauss did not spell out exactly how the tone poem lines up with the story, but the music itself is quite demonstrative. The dashing passage at the beginning surely marks the appearance of Don Juan, the insatiable seducer, while the coy phrases that come in response must be his conquests. The amorous episodes, interspersed with pangs of self-doubt and regret, build to the central romance of the work, a vulnerable love song first offered by a solo oboe. (Strauss wrote Don Juan during his courtship of the soprano Pauline de Ahna, and the tender feelings he conjured in this episode might offer a window into his own affections for his future wife.) A vigorous horn motive brings back the rakish aspect of Don Juan, and the ensuing storminess rushes him to judgment.
In Lenau’s version of the story, Don Juan dies when he drops his defenses in a duel with the father of a woman he seduced. The music representing this scene reaches a tense silence, and then an eerie coda leads to a final state of unsettled, trembling quietude.
George Enescu
Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A major, Op. 11
(1901)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes
George Enescu was a child prodigy who began playing violin at age four and composing at five. He left his native Romania at seven, studying first in Vienna and then at the illustrious Paris Conservatory, where he trained under Massenet and Fauré. Not long after he graduated, Enescu composed two Romanian Rhapsodies, following the model of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The First Rhapsody in particular became a crowd favorite, and this festive music written before his 20th birthday shaped the public’s perception of Enescu for the rest of his career (much to his chagrin). Few can resist the work’s youthful charm and vigor, from its first playful quotations of a Romanian drinking song to its saucy finish.
-- © 2020 Aaron Grad
Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto in C major for Piano, Violin, Cello and Orchestra, Op. 56, "Triple Concerto"
(1803)
Approximate duration: 33 minutes
History has been unkind to Beethoven’s “Triple” Concerto, a work created in the most heroic phase of the orchestral world’s favorite composer. Coming on the heels of the “Eroica” Symphony No. 3, the unprecedented Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano was a product of Beethoven’s groundbreaking “middle” period. It was a time when encroaching deafness reoriented this keyboard virtuoso’s relationship to composing and performing, and when his style advanced past the tidy aesthetic he inherited from Haydn and Mozart to the bold and elemental approach that ushered in music’s Romantic age.
The “Triple” Concerto was Beethoven’s take on the Sinfonia concertante—a concerto for multiple soloists that had been popular since the 1770s, updating the Baroque trend of the concerto grosso that embedded a group of soloists within a larger ensemble. Beethoven may have been the first composer to craft a Sinfonia concertante for violin, cello and piano, but it was a chamber music configuration he knew well, having released a set of three trios for the same instrumentation as his Opus 1.
Beethoven’s former student and early biographer, Anton Schindler, was responsible for advancing the story that the “Triple” Concerto was designed to feature the Archduke Rudolph, the Emperor’s teenaged brother who began taking piano lessons from Beethoven around 1803. Subsequent research has determined that Beethoven himself played the piano part at an initial private reading in 1804, hosted and paid for by his patron Prince Lobkowitz. Beethoven published the “Triple” Concerto in 1807 with a dedication to the prince, and the first public performance appears to have occurred in 1808, possibly featuring Marie Bigot, a French pianist in Vienna who was much admired by Haydn and Beethoven and who later taught young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.
The apparently false story tying the “Triple” Concerto to Archduke Rudolf has left an unfortunate residue: It comes with the implication that the piano part was intentionally simplistic, so as not to overtax an amateur. What we can hear for ourselves is that the piano is one part of a whole, perfectly positioned to support and not overwhelm its fellow soloists. From the proud Allegro that opens the Concerto, through the hushed Largo, and on to the dance-inspired Rondo alla polacca, the convivial interplay among three equals provides a charming counterpoint to the weightier themes that dominated Beethoven’s life and music circa 1804, a time of profound struggle and isolation.
Welcome to Keynotes, NWS's new program-based podcast! NWS audiences can now soak up musical clips and commentary for an upcoming performance while on the road, in the kitchen or at work -- wherever life takes you! Keynotes will be available for select concerts throughout the season. Let us set the stage for your concert experience by sharing noteworthy moments guided by NWS’s program note annotator Aaron Grad. Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc.
For Aaron's full program notes, click here.
Cristian Măcelaru, conductor

Currently in his first season as Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Cristian Măcelaru is one of the fast-rising stars of the conducting world. Recently appointed as Music Director as the National Orchestra of France, he will begin this position in September 2021.
In January 2020 Mr. Măcelaru received his first-ever Grammy Award for conducting the Decca Classics recording of Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto with Nicola Benedetti and The Philadelphia Orchestra.
Summer 2020 will commence Mr. Măcelaru’s first season as Inaugural Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra at Interlochen Center for the Arts. It will also mark his fourth season as Music Director and Conductor of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the world’s leading festival dedicated to contemporary symphonic repertoire. Among the 2020 season’s highlights are a dozen composers-in-residence, including Sean Shepherd who premieres a new work for the Festival.
Mr. Măcelaru attracted international attention for the first time in 2012, when he stepped into the breach with the Chicago Symphony, deputizing for Pierre Boulez. In the same year, he received the Solti Emerging Conductor Award for young conductors, followed in 2014 with the Solti Conducting Award. Since then, he has performed regularly at the podium of the best American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony and National Symphony. A particularly close collaboration connects him with The Philadelphia Orchestra, where he served for three seasons as Conductor-in-Residence.
Mr. Măcelaru has been in great demand as guest conductor with many reputable orchestras worldwide, among others the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (DSO) Berlin, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony and Danish National Symphony.
The 2020-21 season marks Mr. Măcelaru’s second year as Chief Conductor at the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. He continues to strengthen his European presence with appearances including with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, German Chamber Philharmonic Bremen, Bamberg Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Monte Carlo Philharmonic and Belgian National Orchestra. In North America, he returns to the San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Seattle and St. Louis symphonies.
As part of the 2020 Beethoven Year celebrations, Mr. Măcelaru leads the New Japan Philharmonic in an all-Beethoven program at Suntory Hall in Tokyo with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, cellist Daniel Müller-Schott and pianist Lambert Orkis.
Mr. Măcelaru was born in Timișoara, Romania and comes from a musical family. His studies took him from Romania to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, University of Miami in Florida and Rice University in Houston, where he studied conducting with Larry Rachleff. He then deepened his knowledge at Tanglewood Music Center and Aspen Music Festival. He resides in Bonn with his wife Cheryl and children Beniamin and Maria.
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio

For over four decades of success the world over, including many award-winning recordings and newly commissioned works, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio continues to dazzle audiences and critics alike with its performances. Since making their debut at the White House for President Carter's Inauguration in 1977, pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson have set the standard for performance of the piano trio literature. As one of the only long-lived ensembles with all its original members, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio balances the careers of three internationally acclaimed soloists while making annual appearances at many of the world's major concert halls, commissioning spectacular new works and maintaining an active recording agenda.
The Trio honors 250 years of Beethoven with a complete Beethoven Cycle in New York, and all-Beethoven recitals in Georgia, California and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where they are Ensemble-in-Residence.
Recent highlights include performances of the complete Beethoven Cycles at Boston's Gardner Museum and for the Miami Friends of Chamber Music, as well as performances across the U.S. that continue the Trio's legacy of introducing new works, including commissions by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and André Previn.
The Trio’s recordings include Passionate Diversions, which includes works written for them by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and a double CD set of Schubert works on the BRIDGE label. The Trio’s previous recording projects on KOCH include a four-disc Brahms Cycle of the complete trios, Arensky and Tchaikovsky trios and a beloved two-volume set of the complete Beethoven Trios. In addition, KOCH re-released many of the Trio’s hallmark recordings, including works by Ravel, Richard Danielpour and Shostakovich, as well as Legacies, filled with trios written especially for the group. The Trio recently recorded Silverman's Piano Trio No. 2, “Reveille," which they originally premiered with Sting at New York's 92nd St Y.
Musical America named the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio the 2002 Ensemble of the Year. They were awarded the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artists Award by the Foundation for Recorded Music, in 2002 and in 2011.
Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson serve on the instrumental and chamber music faculty at The Cleveland Institute of Music, where they began teaching in 2012. Both Mr. Laredo and Ms. Robinson were professors at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music for seven years prior. Joseph Kalichstein teaches at The Juilliard School.
For more information, please visit kalichstein-laredo-robinson-trio.com.
Chad Goodman, conductor

Chad Goodman serves as the Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony and as an Assistant Conductor to the San Francisco Symphony. With a flair for inventive programming and a bold presence on stage and in the community, he has been praised for "bringing innovation to classical music" (Forbes).
Mr. Goodman designs and presents programs which reimagine how orchestras connect with their audiences. His 2019 education program, “SPARK: How Composers Find Inspiration,” blended captivating light design and videography with engaging audience participation to explore how a composition is created and brought to life by an orchestra. In his first season as Conducting Fellow at NWS, he conducted on nearly a dozen programs and worked closely with Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas, sharing the podium with him on three programs.
Since 2018, Mr. Goodman has served as an Assistant Conductor to the San Francisco Symphony, assisting Esa-Pekka Salonen, Manfred Honeck, Daniel Harding, Pablo Heras-Casado, Simone Young and James Gaffigan, among others.
As Founder and Artistic Director of Elevate Ensemble, Mr. Goodman’s ambitious vision for concert programming resulted in the pairing of music from Bay Area composers with underappreciated gems of the 20th and 21st centuries. Under his leadership, Elevate Ensemble established a Composer-in-Residence program and commissioned 15 works from Bay Area composers.
Elevate collaborated with photographers, videographers, poets and culinary artists, bringing new music and vibrant multi-genre experiences to unique venues such as yoga studios, historic Victorian homes and art studio warehouses.
Mr. Goodman has previously served as Music Director of the Contra Costa Chamber Orchestra and Assistant Conductor of the Peninsula Symphony. He has been a conducting fellow for the Atlantic Music Festival, a rehearsal and cover conductor for the San Francisco Ballet, and has collaborated with composer Mason Bates on his electronica-classical music project, Mercury Soul.
In addition to his performing career, Mr. Goodman has discussed the future of live performance as a panelist at Meyer Sound Laboratories and taught young musicians the business and entrepreneurial skills needed to successfully navigate the world as a working musician in his workshop “You Just Earned a Music Degree. Now What?”
Mr. Goodman holds a bachelor of music degree from the Eastman School of Music and a master of music degree from San Francisco State University. His mentors include Michael Tilson Thomas, Alasdair Neale, Cyrus Ginwala and Martin Seggelke.