Carnegie Hall

(New York, NY, June 30, 2021)—Carnegie Hall’s online series continue in July featuring a range of programming for music lovers, including historic filmed performances streamed as part of Carnegie Hall Selects, and a new concert featuring music making by Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles.

 

Carnegie Hall Selects: Premieres and Debuts

 

Carnegie Hall continues to offer weekly free full-length historic concert streams via carnegiehall.org, featuring legendary classical musicians in inspirational performances from some of the finest concert halls around the world. The series, Carnegie Hall Selects, celebrates great artists, composers, and musical works that have had a central role as part of Carnegie Hall's history. A new Carnegie Hall Selects program will be offered each Friday throughout the summer. In July and August, five streamed Carnegie Hall Selects programs showcase works which famously had their premieres at Carnegie Hall: Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto as well as artists whose long careers performing at the Hall contributed to some of the most legendary concerts in the building’s history: pianist Arthur Rubinstein and composer/conductor Pierre Boulez.

Featured Carnegie Hall Selects streams in July/early August include:

• Friday, July 16—On December 16, 1893, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall. Written during the composer’s brief tenure in New York City, the symphony is American in its influences, but universal in its musical marvels. The Czech Philharmonic is the foremost interpreter of works by native son Dvořák, as conducted in this 2013 performance by Jiří Bělohlávek in Dvořák Hall of Prague’s Rudolfinum.

• Friday, July 23—Since its opening week in 1891, Carnegie Hall has presented concert performances of the world’s most celebrated operas, including the US premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin on February 1, 1908. This lyric opera features unabashedly expressive music that lifts the story of a callous young man who spurns true love and lives to regret it. Filmed at the 2007 Salzburg Festival, Daniel Barenboim conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with a cast led by Peter Mattei and Anna Samuil.

• Friday, July 30—Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto was one of only a handful of works he wrote that included orchestral forces alongside the keyboard. Arthur Rubinstein—whose Carnegie Hall career spanned more than 130 performances from 1906 to 1976—highlights the concerto’s exquisite lyricism with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn in this 1975 film recorded in London’s Fairfield Halls.

• Friday, August 6—Pierre Boulez’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1965 was the start of a 45-year relationship that included his curation of the Hall’s first Perspectives series in the 1999–2000 season and his tenure as the Debs Composer’s Chair from 1999 to 2003. He was also the first to be named composer in residence at the Salzburg Festival in 1992, where he frequently conducted and premiered new works. Leading the festival’s opening concert in 2008, Boulez is joined by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for a program that features Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Daniel Barenboim.

• Friday, August 13—Between 1909 and 1942, Rachmaninoff made nearly 100 appearances at Carnegie Hall. His debut on November 13, 1909, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra featured his own Second Piano Concerto, which has since become his most frequently performed work at the Hall. In this film from 1973, Herbert von Karajan leads the Berlin Philharmonic with soloist Alexis Weissenberg in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 live at the Berlin Philharmonie.

Each new Carnegie Hall Selects program will be made available on Friday beginning at 12:00 p.m. (EST) and will be available for free on-demand viewing for one week on carnegiehall.org.

Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Ensembles

 

This summer, Carnegie Hall once again brings together more than 200 of the finest teen musicians from across the country to train and perform as part of its three acclaimed national youth ensembles: National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA), NYO2, and NYO Jazz. An intensive three-week residency at Purchase College, State University of New York culminates in a free streaming concert showcasing each ensemble on Saturday, July 24 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Carnegie Hall’s website, Facebook, and YouTube channels. Led by Guest Conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, NYO-USA performs Tchaikovsky’s’ Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique). NYO2 performs Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis after Themes by Carl Maria von Weber and Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. NYO Jazz performs new works, big band standards, and new arrangements of contemporary pieces, led by Sean Jones. The presentation also features interviews with the young musicians as they reflect on their experiences with the program this summer. Fans of the national youth ensembles are encouraged to follow along for a behind the scenes look into this summer on NYO-USA, NYO2, and NYO Jazz’s Instagram channel.

 

Carnegie Hall Selects is part of the Live with Carnegie Hall digital series.

Live with Carnegie Hall is made possible by Hope and Robert F. Smith.

Brought to you by: Bank of America.

Additional support has been provided by the Siegel Family Endowment.

Support for Learn with Carnegie Hall is provided by Hope and Robert F. Smith, and the Siegel Family Endowment.

Carnegie Hall also thanks generous supporters of the wide range of music education and social impact programs created by the Weill Music Institute.

Photo of Bělohlávek by Petra Hajska; Photo of Boulez by Ali Schafler