Events & Tickets
WALLCAST® Concert
WALLCAST® Concert: Denève and Isabel Leonard
SoundScape Park
Program
Prepare for an enchanting experience as Artistic Director Stéphane Denève delves into musical storytelling through famous composers of his homeland. Grammy Award-winning soprano Isabel Leonard makes her anticipated NWS debut in Maurice Ravel’s evocative spin on the Arabian Nights classic. Florent Schmitt’s fierce and seductive take on the story of Salome would pave the way for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Albert Roussel’s tale of garden insects comes alive through new animations by artist Grégoire Pont that will dance across the sails of the New World Center. NWS Conducting Fellow Molly Turner joins for Ravel’s playful “Morning Song of a Jester.”
WALLCAST® concerts are free. No tickets required.
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WALLCAST® Concert Club: Attend a WALLCAST Concert and check-in at the Concert Club table to win prizes and rewards.
Expanded Viewing Area: In addition to the New World Center’s 7,000-square-foot projection wall, NWS's new Mobile Wall, a 23x13-foot projection wall with a state-of-the-art sound system, will extend the viewing areas in SoundScape Park during the WALLCAST® concert.
Restrooms: There are always restrooms available in the south-east corner of SoundScape Park.
What's a WALLCAST® concert? Click here to get a taste of the WALLCAST® concert experience!
Live closed captions are available throughout this concert by visiting nws.edu/captions.
Program
Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)
Approx. Duration: 8 minutes
Alborada del gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester)
(1904)
Ms. Turner
Albert Roussel
(1869-1937)
Approx. Duration: 32 minutes
The Spider's Feast, Op. 17
(1912)
Featuring commissioned animations by artist Grégoire Pont
Intermission
Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)
Approx. Duration: 19 minutes
Shéhérazade
(1902)
Asia
The Enchanted Flute
The Indifferent One
Ms. Leonard
Florent Schmitt
(1870-1958)
Approx. Duration: 27 minutes
Suite from La Tragédie de Salome, Op. 50
(1907)
Isabel Leonard, soprano
Three-time Grammy Award winning artist Isabel Leonard has established herself as one of the most in demand performers as a star on the world’s leading stages and screens. The 2022-23 season saw Leonard’s much anticipated role debut as Octavian in Roberto Carson’s production of Der Rosenkavalier, opposite Lise Davidsen, as well as her house debut at Teatro alla Scala as Miranda in Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. Leonard also makes her house debut at Houston Grand Opera to sing Charlotte in Werther, conducted by Robert Spano. Continuing her long-time collaboration with Stéphane Denève, she appears as Marguerite in a concert performance of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust. In the recital hall, Leonard partners with renowned Spanish guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas for performances with Lincoln Center Presents the Metropolitan Opera at Alice Tully Hall, LA Opera at the Colburn School, San Diego Opera at the La Jolla Music Society, at the Harris Theatre in Chicago and the Conservatorìo de Música de Puerto Rico.
Highlights of Leonard’s career include the title roles in Carmen, La Périchole, Cendrillon, Marnie and Der Rosenkavalier, as well as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Angelina in La Cenerentola, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, Dorabella in Così fan tutte, Zerlina and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Charlotte in Werther, Blanche de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites, Costanza in Griselda, Musetta in La bohème, Sesto in Giulio Cesare and Maria in West Side Story.
Leonard regularly appears on the stages of the world’s leading opera stages including The Metropolitan Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Wiener Staatsoper, Los Angeles Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, San Francisco Opera, Aix-en-Provence Festival, Salzburg Festspiele and Teatro Comunale di Bologna. She regularly enjoys collaboration with esteemed conductors including Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yannick Nézét-Seguin, Franz Welser-Möst, Plácido Domingo, Edward Gardner, James Levine, Edo de Waart, James Conlon, Marin Alsop, Sir Andrew Davis, Michele Mariotti, Harry Bicket, Andris Nelsons and Michael Tilson Thomas. Orchestral highlights include appearances with Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, among others.
Television and film credits include an appearance in the Rebecca Miller film She Came to Me, starring Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei, being featured on the season 43 finale of Sesame Street in Murray Monster’s “People in Your Neighborhood’ segment, scenes from Terrence McNally’s Masterclass directed by Nicole Alexander, and as a regular host of The Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcasts.
Leonard was named recipient of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award and currently has three Grammy Awards for Michael Tilson Thomas’ From the Diary of Anne Frank on SFS Media, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges on Decca, and The Tempest from The Metropolitan Opera on Deutsche Grammophon. She currently resides in New York and sits on the Board of Trustees at Carnegie Hall and on the Artistic Advisory Board of ArtSmart.
Molly Turner, conductor
Molly Turner is a Chinese-born conductor and composer. Recently, she has conducted the Orchestre de Paris, Gstaad Festival Orchestra, Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn, Juilliard Orchestra, Dallas Opera Orchestra, Primrose International Viola Competition, Colburn Orchestra and Eastern Festival Orchestra. Highlights of the 2022-23 season included a debut with San Francisco Symphony's SoundBox Series, a Concert Scolaire with Orchestre de Paris, conducting the premiere of her own new orchestra work with the Tacoma Youth Symphony, Colburn Chamber Music Society with David Rejano and Cosi! Men Are Like That with opera company White Snake Projects. She has served as assistant conductor for the Berliner Philharmoniker, Orchestre de Paris, San Francisco Symphony, Utah Symphony, San Diego Symphony, National Polish Radio Symphony, Juilliard Orchestra and Colburn Orchestra. In 2019 she was the youngest conductor invited for residency at the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors. She has assisted Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, Stéphane Denève, Yaniv Dinur, Rafael Payare, Nicholas McGegan and Jeffrey Milarsky.
Ms. Turner is a devoted advocate for contemporary and modern music. She has collaborated with many living composers including Paul Novak, Max Vinetz, Lauren Vandervelden, Corey Chang, Sujin Kang, Webster Gadbois and Sofia Ouyang and has a strong affinity for the music of Stravinsky, Bartók and Lutosławski. She is a member of the Colburn Contemporary Ensemble and has conducted works by Lou Harrison, Timo Andres and Nina Young with them. As part of Juilliard’s ChoreoComp, Ms. Turner premiered four different dance pieces created by current student composers and choreographers and at Rice, she conducted and composed for Hear&Now: New Music.
Pursuing projects outside of the traditional concert hall is a core part of Ms. Turner’s artistic identity. In 2021 she performed an open improvisation set on violin alongside Pablo O’Connell, Kebra-Seyoun Charles and Ryan Jung in an Alice Tully Hall window performance. While she was a Teaching Artist Fellow at Juilliard, she was involved in creating an improvisatory work that used K-8 student “found sound” recordings as source material. From 2017-19 was the artistic director for New Art / New Music at the Moody Center for the Arts. There she worked with composers and visual artists to curate a concert of new works that were site-specific to current exhibitions at the Moody Center. In 2017 she played viola in a multimedia performance art project alongside Angelbet Metoyer creating art live, Saul Williams reciting poetry and other musicians openly improvising. In 2015 she co-wrote a graphic score with Sarah Grace-Graves for sculptor Katie Grinnan’s Astrology Orchestra written for the Turrell Skypsace.
In her own music, Ms. Turner is interested in the balance between strictly dictated elements and more aleatoric notation. Her relationship to the standard repertoire is often integrated in subtle ways beneath the foreground of the music. A violinist and violist herself, she finds string instruments endlessly fascinating. Improvisation is a core part of her writing process and she often starts her work as voice memos or graphic scores. In 2018 her string quartet, The Shapes of Stories, was read by the Arditti Quartet. Her work has been heard in Benaroya Hall, Duncan Recital Hall, the Moody Center for the Arts and has been privately recorded.
She completed her master’s degree in orchestral conducting at The Juilliard School studying with David Robertson and received a bachelor in music composition cum laude from Rice University. She recently was pursuing an artist diploma at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, where she studied under the guidance of Esa-Pekka Salonen in the Negaunee Conducting Program as a Salonen Fellow. She has studied composition with Kurt Stallmann, Arthur Gottschalk, Karim Al-Zand and Richard Lavenda. She has attended the Gstaad Festival Conducting Academy where she worked with Johannes Schlaefli, Jaap van Zweden and Baldur Brönnimann and the Eastern Music Festival, where she worked with Gerard Schwarz. In her free time, she enjoys biking, playing Ultimate Frisbee and reading.
