Boston Symphony Orchestra
Opening Night Gala

Performers

• Ann Hobson Pilot, Harp
• Boston Symphony Orchestra
  Daniele Gatti, Conductor
• Evgeny Kissin, Piano

Program

• BEETHOVEN Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
• CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21
• JOHN WILLIAMS On Willows and Birches, for harp and orchestra (NY Premiere)
• DEBUSSY La mer
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  Encores:
• CHOPIN Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1, "Minute"
• LISZT Soirées de Vienne (Valses caprices d’après Schubert), No. 6

Bios

• Ann Hobson Pilot retired from the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2009 Tanglewood season, following 40 years of service to the orchestra. Ms. Hobson Pilot became principal harp of the BSO in 1980, having joined the orchestra in 1969 as assistant principal harp and principal harp with the Boston Pops. Prior to her time with the BSO, she was substitute second harp with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and principal harp of the National Symphony Orchestra. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, she has also had an extensive solo career, performing with many American orchestras as well as with orchestras in Europe, Haiti, New Zealand, and South Africa. She has several recordings available on the Boston Records label, as well as on Koch International and Denouement. Ms. Hobson Pilot holds a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bridgewater State College. In 1998 and 1999 she was featured in a video documentary sponsored by the Museum of Afro-American History and WGBH, aired nationwide on PBS, about her personal musical journey as well as her African journey to find the roots of the harp. She is currently working with Susan Dangel, the producer of Musical Journey, to create a new half-hour documentary that will tell the story of her life in music (musicaljourney.org). In September 1999 she traveled to London to record, with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Harp Concerto by the young American composer Kevin Kaska, a work she commissioned. Ms. Hobson Pilot has been a faculty member of the New England Conservatory, Boston University, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. She is a member of the contemporary music ensemble Collage New Music, and has also performed with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and Ritz Chamber Players and at the Marlboro, Newport, and Sarasota music festivals, among others. On Opening Night of the BSO’s 2009–2010 season—a program being repeated by the BSO tonight at Carnegie Hall—she played the world premiere of John Williams’s On Willows and Birches for Harp and Orchestra, composed especially for her and the orchestra on the occasion of her retirement. She repeats the piece this Friday night in Boston, in a BSO subscription concert that also features her in music of Carter and Debussy.

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• Born in Moscow in October 1971, Evgeny Kissin began playing by ear and improvising on the piano at two. At six he entered the Moscow Gnessin School of Music, where he was a student of Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who has remained his only teacher. He came to international attention in March 1984 when, at 12, he performed Chopin’s piano concertos in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow State Philharmonic under Dmitri Kitaenko. Since his first appearances outside Russia in 1985, he has played with all of the leading orchestras and conductors and in recital worldwide. He makes regular recital tours to the US, Japan, and throughout Europe, and in spring 2009 embarked on a sold-out tour that included engagements in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo. During the 2009–2010 season he performs with the Boston, National, and Toronto symphony orchestras, and is featured with James Levine and the Boston Symphony in the BSO’s Opening Night concert in Boston and then in Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala. Mr. Kissin’s recent recordings include Prokofiev’s Second and Third concertos with Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia Orchestra as well as the five Beethoven concertos, Mozart’s C-Minor Concerto, and the Schumann Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Colin Davis, all on EMI Classics. He performed in the 1992 Grammy Awards ceremony broadcast live to an audience estimated at over one billion, became Musical America’s youngest Instrumentalist of the Year in 1995, and in 1997 received the prestigious Triumph Award for his outstanding contribution to Russia’s culture, again as the youngest-ever recipient. He was the first musician to give a solo recital at the BBC Promenade Concerts (1997), and the first concerto soloist invited to play in the Proms opening concert (2000). In December 2003, in Moscow, he received the Shostakovich Award, one of Russia’s highest musical honors. He was awarded an Honorary Membership of the Royal Academy of Music in London in June 2005, and in March 2009 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Hong Kong University. His recordings have received numerous awards, including a Grammy, the Edison Klassiek, the Diapason d’Or, and the Grand Prix of La Nouvelle Academie du Disque.

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