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Datebook
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August 31: Tokyo
Pablo Heras-Casado
NHK Symphony Orchestra
Stockhausen: Gruppen
Aug. 31, Sept. 2-3: Jerusalem
Kirill Gerstein
Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival
Handel, Haydn, Messiaen, Poulenc, Prokofiev
Sept. 4: St. Jean de Luz, France
Pablo Heras-Casado
Orchestre National de Bordeaux
Debussy, Liszt, Albeniz
Sept. 6, 7, 8: Cologne, Germany
Kirill Gerstein
G�rzenich Orchestra
Brahms: Piano Cto. 2
Sept. 10-12: Trieste, Italy
Kirill Gerstein
Orchestra del Teatro Lirico di Trieste
Tchaikovsky: Piano Cto. 1
Sept. 16: Zurich, Switzerland
Pablo Heras-Casado
Collegium Novum Zurich
Falla, Sciarrino, Lachenmann
Sept. 17-19: Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Kirill Gerstein
Brabant Symphony Orchestra
Rachmaninoff: Piano Cto. 3
Sept. 19: Zurich, Switzerland
Pablo Heras-Casado
Tonhalle Zurich
Scriabin, Arriaga, Falla
Sept. 24: Hattiesburg, MS
Joshua Roman
U. Southern Mississippi Symphony
Schumann: Cello Concerto
Sept. 25, 26: Omaha, NE
Kirill Gerstein
Omaha Symphony
Rachmaninoff: Piano Cto. 3
Sept. 26: Kansas City, MO
Stefan Jackiw
Harriman-Jewell Series
Recital with Max Levinson
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About 21C Artists To Watch
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21C Artists To Watch is an image- and awareness-building program for artists on the brink of major careers in classical music. Each month, 21C Media Group publishes an e-newsletter profiling several members of this select group and highlighting their recent and upcoming activities. The initiative was announced in May 2009. Read the news release here.
For inquires regarding any of 21C Artists To Watch, please contact:
Wende Persons
Artists To Watch
Program Director
ph (917) 691-1282
Click here to contact Wende. | |
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Pablo Heras-Casado's podium versatility
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At the age of 31, Pablo Heras-Casado already has a remarkably versatile international career. In the past few months the Spanish conductor has led concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers in London in music exploring Mendelssohn's royal connections ; two world premieres with Klangforum Vienna in Granada and Seville; film scores with Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; concerts in Aldeburgh and London's Tate Modern gallery with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain; and a recording of Nino Rota's Trombone Concerto with SWR Symphony Orchestra Freiburg. Later this month Heras-Casado travels to Tokyo for Stockhausen's Gruppen with the NHK Symphony Orchestra. Orchestral, choral, new and early music and opera are intertwined in Heras-Casado's musical interests. "I look for the new," says the Granada native, "whether the ink is still wet on the page or a first performance of ancient music. It's about the discovery." Heras-Casado is music director of the only original-instrument chamber opera company in Spain; Compania Teatro del Principe in Aranjuez specializes in performances of neglected or newly discovered 17th- and 18th-century music. At the Aranjuez Festival in June "La Compania" performed and made the world premiere recording of L'Isola Disabitata by Giuseppe Bonno, an 18th-century Italian who worked in the Spanish court at the time of Ferdinand VI. In September Heras-Casado returns to France to lead the Orchestre National de Bordeaux, and then heads for a double dip at the Tonhalle Zurich: a re-invitation to the Collegium Novum Zurich and his debut with the Tonhalle Orchestra in the very same week. American music lovers will have to wait until next summer to hear the fast-rising conductor on our continent. Watch for details of his 2009-2010 American engagements in coming newsletters. For more information, visit PabloHerasCasado.com or the Harrison Parrott web site. |
James Valenti makes Met and Covent Garden debuts
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 It has become almost habitual for American tenor James Valenti to make major house debuts in leading roles alongside today's most renowned performers. In 2005 he made his Salzburg Festival debut as Alfredo in Verdi's La traviata opposite Anna Netrebko and Thomas Hampson, and earlier this year he made his Teatro alla Scala debut as Rodolfo in La boheme under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. In keeping with this tradition, the 2009/10 season finds James Valenti making his Met and Covent Garden debuts as Alfredo, both opposite Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu.
The New Jersey-born Italian-American, who is lauded not only for his vocal abilities but also for his physical appearance (the New York Daily News praised the six-foot-five tenor's "all-American good looks"), studied at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and is the recipient of numerous awards and competitions, including the 2002 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and the Licia Albanese-Puccini, Opera Index, Mario Lanza, George London Foundation and Caruso International voice competitions. In 2009 he was named Dallas Opera Debut Artist of the Year; past winners include Cecilia Bartoli and Patricia Racette.
In addition to his debuts with the Met and the Royal Opera House, James Valenti will perform a special duo concert with Angela Gheorghiu at London's Royal Festival Hall on October 2; he will also sing the Duke in Rigoletto at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, and his first Werther in Tokyo. He also returns to the Minnesota Opera in February to sing Rodolfo. The 31-year-old tenor stars in a satirical television commercial Minnesota Opera produced to promote its season, which can be found on YouTube.
For more information, visit JamesValenti.com or the IMG Artists web site.
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Kirill Gerstein in Verbier, Caracas, Lucerne, Saratoga...
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 Like Mariano Rivera, the Yankee's top closer, this past weekend Kirill Gerstein closed out the Saratoga Performing Arts Center's summer season. The Russian pianist played Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations with the Philadelphia Orchestra under conductor Charles Dutoit and a chamber music concert on Sunday. Gerstein debuted at SPAC two season ago and impressed Dutoit. "Kirill is a great pianist. He's also very civilized, very educated," Dutoit said in a Daily Gazette concert preview. Their collaboration continues in December in Tokyo with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, and in Chicago in March for Gerstein's Chicago Symphony debut. The 29-year-old pianist's engagements this summer have been an airline company's dream. In July and August, in order, Gerstein played a Mendelssohn Concerto in Tel Aviv; chamber music in Colmar, France; Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (the original band version) in Saarbr�cken, Germany; more chamber music at the Aix-en-Provence and Verbier festivals in France and Switzerland; a recital at Verbier; Bernstein's Age of Anxiety in Caracas, Venezuela with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra; and chamber music at the Salon-de-Provence in France, the Delft Festival in the Netherlands, and the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. Gerstein's Lucerne Festival concert was broadcast on New York's WQXR last week. View a clip from his Caracas performance with Dudamel last month of Bernstein's Age of Anxiety. Gerstein's multi-faceted musical journey began when he was a child in Russia and he taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents' recordings. At 14 he became the youngest student ever admitted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. By 20, he had earned advanced degrees in classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music, and a piano professorship by the age of 27 at the Hochschule f�r Musik in Stuttgart, Germany. The 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award recipient was chosen as Carnegie Hall's "Rising Star" for the 2005-06 season. For more information, visit KirillGerstein.com or CM Artists web site. | |
