CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
San Francisco Symphony / Opening Night Gala

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 7:00 PM

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Christine Ebersole, Vocalist
Thomas Hampson, Baritone
Yo-Yo Ma, Cello
Ensemble selected from the Vocal Arts Department and the Drama Division of The Juilliard School

BERNSTEIN Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
BERNSTEIN Selections from A Quiet Place
·· Prelude from Act I
·· You're Late
·· Morning. Good morning.
·· Postlude from Act I
BERNSTEIN "I Can Cook Too" from On the Town
BERNSTEIN Meditation No. 1 from Mass
BERNSTEIN "What a Movie!" from Trouble in Tahiti
BERNSTEIN "To What You Said" from Songfest
BERNSTEIN "Danzón" from Fancy Free
BERNSTEIN "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story
BERNSTEIN "Ya Got Me" from On the Town

Opening Night Gala Sponsor: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Major support for the Opening Night Gala Broadcast has been provided by S. Donald Sussman.

Major funding for Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Alice Tully Foundation, American Express, Bob and Martha Lipp, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, Nash Family Foundation, and Mr. and Mrs. A. Alfred Taubman.

Additional funding provided by GWFF USA Inc., and Linda and Stuart Nelson.

Generous support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Notes:

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Born August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts; died October 14, 1990, in New York City.

Throughout his career, Leonard Bernstein struggled to balance the competing demands of his gifts as composer, conductor, pianist, and media personality. Time for composition was potentially the most endangered in the mix that packed his date book, and he had to take special care that it didn’t get entirely crowded out by his day-to-day obligations as a performer. In this, as in so many other regards, Bernstein shared the burden that in a previous generation had been visited on his spiritual exemplar, Gustav Mahler.

Bernstein’s instincts for the stage were excellent. He conducted some opera, though the center of his performing repertory was symphonic; but he also enriched the repertory by composing numerous works for stage performance. These ranged from incidental music for plays to ballets (including such indelible scores as Fancy Free, Facsimile, and Dybbuk), musical theater pieces (On the Town, Wonderful Town, West Side Story, Mass, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), and even operas.

This concert touches on quite a few of Bernstein’s stage works, and it’s only fair that it begin with music from the piece that earned him his widest popular acclaim: West Side Story. As early as 1949 Leonard Bernstein and his friends Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) had batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form; an early version tentatively titled East Side Story was altered when it was discovered that all the really suitable tenements were on the other side of town.

On August 19, 1957, West Side Story opened in a tryout run in Washington, DC, and it proved a firm hit when it reached Broadway, running for 772 performances—just short of two years—before embarking on a national tour and making its way back to New York in 1960 for another 253 performances, after which it was turned into a feature film in 1961. “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune, in the wake of the New York opening, and one might argue that his assumption remains true more than a half-century later. West Side Story stands as an essential, influential chapter in the history of American theater, and its tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture.

In the opening weeks of 1961, Bernstein revisited his score for West Side Story and extracted nine sections to assemble into what he called the Symphonic Dances. In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just completed the orchestration of West Side Story for its film version, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them not in the order in which they occur in the musical but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence derived from strictly musical rationale.

Of all the stage genres in which Bernstein worked, operas gave him the greatest grief, and he continued to revise them, so that fixing on an authoritative text often proves an exercise in futility. His light opera Candide, for example, exists in seven distinct versions that boast his blessing, at least provisionally. His less-frequently-produced operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, created more than three decades apart, ended up merged into a single work. The one-act Trouble in Tahiti, unveiled in 1952, is a domestic comedy in which young newlyweds, Sam and Dinah, go to an escapist movie (also titled Trouble in Tahiti) rather than grapple with problems in their relationship. The opera therefore involves a very modern premise, but the composer undercut its darkness with a great deal of charm, manifest in Dinah’s “What a Movie!”—an outpouring in which her exotic fantasies mix with self-censure. In 1983 Bernstein, with librettist Stephen Wadsworth, composed A Quiet Place as a sequel to his early opera. Revisiting the Sam-and-Dinah family, Bernstein found their relationship grown considerably more challenging in the three decades since. Dinah has died in a car accident. Reuniting for her funeral after an estrangement of 20 years is the family: Sam, his son, and his daughter and son-in-law (who had previously been the son’s lover). Incorporating biographical elements from the composer’s life and underscoring his lifelong interest in the conflict between spiritual disintegration and humanistic hope, A Quiet Place stands as a late summa of Bernstein’s oeuvre. When A Quiet Place was premiered, Trouble in Tahiti served as a curtain raiser; but by the time of its European premiere, at La Scala in Milan, the earlier opera became incorporated into the later one, divided into two second-act flashbacks.

The other works represented here had less circuitous histories. The ballet Fancy Free and the musical comedy On the Town both date from 1944. The preceding November Bernstein had made his wildly successful Carnegie Hall debut conducting the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for the indisposed Bruno Walter. Now he followed up with these two wartime entertainments: Fancy Free, in which three sailors on leave spend a dizzying 24 hours in New York chasing girls (Jerome Robbins was featured in the Danzon variation), and On the Town, also chronicling the adventures of servicemen in New York, but this time focusing on the women they encounter (including the tough-as-nails cab-driver Hildy, who sings “I Can Cook, Too”).

Mass and Songfest lead us to the 1970s. Written for the opening of the Kennedy Center, Mass is a theatrical extravaganza for singers, players, and dancers. It mixes (disconcertingly for some) the text of the Roman Catholic Mass with original poetry that serves as commentary. Extracted from the complete work, its three orchestral Meditations proved popular as stand-alone movements, and Bernstein’s arrangement of them for cello and orchestra, introduced in 1977 by Mstislav Rostropovich (with the composer conducting the National Symphony Orchestra), are especially memorable. Songfest also saw the light of day in 1977. A 12-movement orchestral cycle of solo songs and vocal ensembles on American poems, it was crafted as a testament to the nation’s cultural diversity. The sentiment of Walt Whitman’s “To What You Said …” raised many an eyebrow in 1977, but this affecting movement has proved the most enduringly popular extract from the entire cycle. Though not intended to be staged, Songfest nonetheless played an important role in Bernstein’s theatrical oeuvre. In its wake he determined to compose, as he put it, “a real American kind of opera, perhaps with the same singers as Songfest.” The cast of singers would change, but the impetus for the new opera continued and led within five years to A Quiet Place.
—James M. Keller

James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, and Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the latter orchestra. His article “Bernstein and Mahler: Channeling a Prophet” appears in the book Leonard Bernstein: American Original, published last month by HarperCollins.

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
The San Francisco Symphony gave its first concerts in 1911 and has grown in acclaim under a succession of music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque, Britain’s Gramophone Award, and the United States’s Grammy. For RCA Red Seal, Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFS have recorded music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, two Copland collections, a Gershwin collection, Stravinsky ballets (Le sacre du printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone), and Charles Ives: An American Journey. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 inaugurated a Mahler cycle on the Symphony’s own label and in 2003 captured a Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance. In 2004, the MTT/SFS recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony captured the Grammy for Best Classical Album, and in 2007 their recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony won Grammys for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Album. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and the list of composers who have led the Orchestra includes Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films as Amadeus and Godfather III. For two decades, the SFS Adventures in Music program has brought music to every child in grades 1 through 5 in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in the US to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the Orchestra’s concerts across the country. In a multimedia program designed to make classical music accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, the SFS has launched Keeping Score on PBS, DVD, the World Wide Web (keepingscore.org), and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at shopsfsymphony.org.


Michael Tilson Thomas first conducted the San Francisco Symphony in 1974 and has been Music Director since 1995. A Los Angeles native, he studied with John Crown and Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, becoming Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra at 19 and working with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland at the famed Monday Evening Concerts. He was pianist and conductor for Piatigorsky and Heifetz master classes and, as a student of Friedelind Wagner, an assistant conductor at Bayreuth. In 1969, Mr. Tilson Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize and was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ten days later he came to international recognition, replacing Music Director William Steinberg in mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He went on to become the BSO’s Associate Conductor, then Principal Guest Conductor. He has also served as Director of the Ojai Festival, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, a Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Principal Conductor of the Great Woods Festival. He became Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and now serves as Principal Guest Conductor. For a decade he served as co-Artistic Director of Japan’s Pacific Music Festival, which he and Leonard Bernstein inaugurated in 1990, and he continues as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1988. Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings have won numerous international awards, and his recorded repertory reflects interests arising from work as conductor, composer, and pianist. His television credits include the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and in 2004 he and the SFS launched Keeping Score on PBS. His compositions include From the Diary of Anne Frank, Shówa/Shoáh (commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), Poems of Emily Dickinson, Urban Legend, Island Music, and Notturno. Among his honors are Columbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American music and Musical America’s 1995 Conductor of the Year award. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gramophone named him its 2005 Artist of the Year.

Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles (Pamina, Ilia, Susanna, Despina) as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. From Salzburg, Paris, and Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career in 1984 and has since made nearly 300 appearances, Ms. Upshaw has also championed numerous new works created for her, including The Great Gatsby by John Harbison; L’amour de loin and La passion de Simone by Kaija Saariaho; John Adams’s nativity oratorio El niño; and Osvaldo Goljjov’s chamber opera Ainadamar and song cyle Ayre. Ms. Upshaw is a favored partner of many leading musicians, including Richard Goode, Kronos Quartet, James Levine, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, with whom she appears in a season-opening in October with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall. She also joins Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Bernstein program in San Francisco and at tonight’s Opening Night Gala evening at Carnegie Hall, which will be broadcast on PBS. In addition, this season she premieres new music by Maria Schneider (commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, where Ms. Upshaw is an Artist Partner) and Michael Ward-Bergeman (with Ensemble ACJW at Zankel Hall). In November, she returns to Lincoln Center with violinist Geoff Nuttall in performances of Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments staged by Peter Sellars, and in December returns to Carnegie Hall for a concert version of Ainadamar with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In 2007 Ms. Upshaw was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “Genius” grant, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a four-time Grammy Award winner featured on more than 50 recordings, including the million-selling Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki. Ms. Upshaw is Artistic Director of the Vocal Arts Program at Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Christine Ebersole, Vocalist
Christine Ebersole has appeared on the Broadway stage, in concert, in television series and specials, and in film. She has received numerous Off-Broadway awards and captured her second Tony Award for Leading Actress in a Musical for her dual role as Edie Beale and Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. Acclaimed by critics and audiences, the show was nominated for ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and its CD was nominated for a Grammy Award. Other New York stage appearances include her Tony Award–winning performance as Dorothy Brock in the revival of 42nd Street, and in Steel Magnolias, On the Twentieth Century, Oklahoma!, Dinner at Eight (Tony and Outer Critics Circle nominations), and The Best Man. She has starred in five City Center Encores! productions, most recently receiving praise for her starring role as Margo Channing in Applause. Ms. Ebersole has appeared in such movies as Tootsie, Richie Rich, Black Sheep, Amadeus, Dead Again, True Crime, and Confessions of a Shopaholic. On television, she was seen as the stripper Tessie Tura in Bette Midler’s Gypsy, co-starred in the reunion film Mary and Rhoda, and was featured with Diana Ross in Double Platinum and with Jane Fonda in The Dollmaker. She has had guest-starring roles in such shows as Will and Grace, Murphy Brown, Cashmere Mafia, and Boston Legal. Ms. Ebersole was a series regular on Saturday Night Live during the 1981–82 season. In televised concerts, she has often appeared on PBS, including Ira Gershwin at 100: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall and The Rodgers & Hart Story: Thou Swell, Thou Witty. In December 2006 she was seen on CBS, performing at the Kennedy Center Honors. Ms. Ebersole has also released such albums as Christine Ebersole: Live at the Cinegrill, In Your Dreams, and Sunday in New York. More information is available at her website, christineebersole.com.

Thomas Hampson, Baritone
American baritone Thomas Hampson is among the world’s most celebrated and sought-after singers performing on the stage today. His “beautiful, lyric baritone voice, smooth and supple” (Time) can be heard on nearly 200 recordings of lieder, opera, oratorio, and works for voice and orchestra. As a leading advocate of the study of American song, he collaborates on song projects with academic and cultural partners through his foundation, Hampsong.org, to promote the art of song in intercultural understanding. He was recently named Special Advisor to the Library of Congress for Education and the Legacy of the Performing Arts. Mr. Hampson’s 2008–09 season begins with performances on the gala opening nights of both the Metropolitan Opera, where he will appear as Germont in La traviata opposite Renée Fleming, and in tonight’s performance at Carnegie Hall, which is scheduled to be broadcast nationally on PBS. Orchestral performance highlights include a European tour with the UBS Verbier Orchestra and a performance of Britten’s War Requiem with Anthony Pappano at the Royal Albert Hall, as well as performances of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with Orchestre de Paris conducted by Christoph Eschenbach and then at Carnegie Hall with the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Operatic highlights include Hampson’s role debut at the Metropolitan Opera in the leading role of Athanael in Massenet’s Thaïs, followed by performances at the Met in the title role of Eugene Onegin. In the spring of 2009 he will make his role debut as Scarpia in Tosca at the Zurich Opera and will appear later in the spring at Covent Garden in La traviata, again with Renée Fleming. He will also appear in recital in Berlin, Lisbon, Prague, Heidelberg, and in selected cities around the US. In addition to his performance activity, Mr. Hampson is a committed teacher, a serious golfer who is regularly ranked in Golf Digest, and a technologist who recently launched his own digital-only record label, THM. For more information, please visit www.hampsong.org.

Yo-Yo Ma, Cello
Yo-Yo Ma was born in 1955 in Paris, began cello studies at age four with his father, and soon came with his family to New York. He studied with Leonard Rose at The Juilliard School and graduated from Harvard in 1976. He has been a frequent guest with the San Francisco Symphony since his debut with the Orchestra in 1970. In 1998 Mr. Ma established the Silk Road Project to study artistic and intellectual traditions along the ancient trade route that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and, in connection with the project, he has performed works created for the Silk Road Ensemble (which also plays traditional music from Silk Road countries). The Project’s activities have included the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and concerts at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan. In 2006–07, with the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and City of Chicago, the Silk Road Project presented Silk Road Chicago, a year-long, citywide celebration. The Project has presented residencies at leading museums and has ongoing affiliations with the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University. Seeking to expand the cello repertory, Yo-Yo Ma has commissioned works from Stephen Albert, Elliott Carter, Chen Yi, Richard Danielpour, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Peter Lieberson, Christopher Rouse, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and John Williams. Mr. Ma is an exclusive Sony Classical artist whose albums have won more than 15 Grammys; his recent recordings include Appassionato and New Impossibilities, featuring the Silk Road Ensemble and Chicago Symphony. Among his awards are the Avery Fisher Prize, Glenn Gould Prize, National Medal of the Arts, and the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. Appointed a CultureConnect Ambassador by the US Department of State in 2002, Yo-Yo Ma has trained thousands in countries including Lithuania, Korea, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, and China. He has performed with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra and conducted master classes there. In 2006, Secretary General Kofi Annan named him a UN Messenger of Peace; Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon extended his appointment. Mr. Ma plays two instruments, a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius.

Ensemble selected from the Vocal Arts Department and the Drama Division of The Juilliard School
Gabriel Ebert is in his fourth year of training with The Juilliard School Drama Division. Upcoming roles include Larry in Burn This and Orestes in The Greeks: Part III. Recent roles include Touchstone in As You Like It, Bennie in Getting Out, Olsen in Street Scene, Austin in True West, and the title role in Richard III. He is a recipient of the Robin Williams Scholarship and co-recipient of the John Houseman Prize.

Carlton Ford is in his second year of study at The Juilliard School, where he is a student of Marlena Malas. He has participated in two Juilliard Opera Center productions in his first year of study at the school. Recent performances include Uncle Yakuside in Madama Butterfly with Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Dancaïro in Carmen at the Chautauqua Music Festival, and a solo recital in Chicago sponsored by the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Paul La Rosa is in his second year as a member of the Juilliard Opera Center. He has appeared in two New York Festival of Song–Juilliard collaborations and appeared with NYFOS at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. With the Chateauville Foundation in Virginia, he sang the role of Junius in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia under the direction of Lorin Maazel. He is a student of Marlena Malas.

Kelly Markgraf, in his second year with Juilliard Opera Center, made his Santa Fe Opera Debut as the Bosun in Billy Budd and later this season sings Mahmoud in John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer at Juilliard with Adams conducting. With Pittsburgh Opera, he will appear in The Grapes of Wrath as the Ragged Man, a role he created in the work’s world premiere at the Minnesota Opera. He studies with Robert C. White.

Zach Villa is in his fourth year of training with The Juilliard School Drama Division. He was an NFAA finalist prior to beginning his studies at Juilliard. Upcoming roles this season include Alceste in The Misanthrope, XL in Wonderland, and Nitetis in The Greeks, Part III. In addition to the title role in Julius Caesar, his recent roles include George in All My Sons, Harry in Street Scene, and Firs in The Cherry Orchard.

Jeanne Slater, choreographer, dancer, actress, and teacher, has been a member of The Juilliard School faculty since 1998. She also serves on the faculties of New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre School and the Aspen Music Festival.