Carnegie Hall

(New York, NY, August 18, 2021)—From this Friday, August 20 through October 1, 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 online series, Carnegie Hall Selects, introduced earlier this summer, celebrates great artists, composers, and musical works that have had a central role as part of the Hall's history. A new Carnegie Hall Selects program will be offered for free each Friday through October 1.

This next collection of Carnegie Hall Selects episodes focuses on artists, ensembles, and works that have been highlighted as part of one of Carnegie Hall’s citywide festivals. Since 2007, Carnegie Hall has presented 12 festivals, providing in-depth explorations of music, culture, and more. Festivals frequently include partner events, such as talks, film screenings, exhibitions, and performances at cultural and academic partner organizations across New York City. These artistic focuses feature music closely associated with a cultural milestone or a historical period.

Featured Carnegie Hall Selects streams in August through October include:

• Friday, August 20— In spring 2021, Carnegie Hall’s online Voices of Hope festival celebrated the life-affirming power of music and the arts during times of crisis, exploring the resilience of artists and the works they felt compelled to create. One of the featured composers was Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote many of his most impressive works under the shadow of Stalin’s tyranny in the Soviet Union. The performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony featured in this episode was recorded at the Téatro Cólon in Buenos Aires with Shostakovich expert Mariss Jansons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2014.
   
• Friday, August 27— Carnegie Hall’s Vienna: City of Dreams festival in 2014 explored the cultural splendor of the great Austrian city where Beethoven composed and premiered his greatest works. One of the festival highlights was a complete cycle of the composer’s sonatas for violin and piano with Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace. In this recording from the Salzburg Festival in 2012, the duo performs the “Kreutzer” Sonata, famously named after Beethoven’s second dedicatee in an act of artistic revenge.
   
• Friday, September 3—Celebrated in Carnegie Hall’s 2014 Vienna: City of Dreams festival, the Austrian city—home to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—was also the epicenter of a shift that shook the musical world, defying conventions and exploring daring new worlds of sound. In the vanguard of this movement were revolutionary composers, including Alban Berg. Berg’s opera Wozzeck—one of the twentieth century’s most defining works—tells the story of a soldier’s descent into madness. Staged by William Kentridge at the Salzburg Festival in 2017, Matthias Goerne is featured in the title role with Asmik Grigorian as Marie and Vladimir Jurowski leading the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
   
• Friday, September 10—Like other classical composers, Gustav Mahler achieved many of his professional successes in Vienna, the focus of Carnegie Hall’s 2014 Vienna: City of Dreams festival. It was in the Austrian city that he served as director of what is now known as the Vienna State Opera and regularly conducted its ensemble of instrumentalists, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Decades after Mahler’s death in 1911, Leonard Bernstein established himself as the ultimate champion of Mahler’s works, becoming the first conductor to record all of the composer’s symphonies. In this performance from 1973 filmed in Vienna’s Musikverein, Bernstein leads the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with soprano soloist Edith Mathis.
   
• Friday, September 17—In 2007, Carnegie Hall’s Berlin in Lights invited audiences to explore the culture of the fascinating city reborn after the reunication of Germany. Anchoring the festival was Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, of which he was music director for 16 years. In this film from 2015 recorded at London’s Barbican Hall, Rattle leads the orchestra in Sibelius’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies—masterworks that received their New York premieres at Carnegie Hall in 1930 and 1927, respectively.  
   
• Friday, September 24—During the Berlin in Lights festival in 2007, Carnegie Hall audiences were introduced to one of the great conductors of our time: Gustavo Dudamel. Filmed at the Salzburg Festival the following year, this concert features Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with pianist Martha Argerich, violinist Renaud Capuçon, and cellist Gautier Capuçon.
   
• Friday, October 1—Inspired by Carnegie Hall’s 2007 Berlin in Lights festival, the celebration of the German city concludes with Beethoven’s valedictory Symphony No. 9—a choral-orchestral extravaganza that culminates in the “Ode to Joy” finale that has become the most frequently cited affirmation of human solidarity in music. Recorded in 1968 in Berlin’s Philharmonie, Herbert von Karajan leads the Berliner Philharmoniker, along with soprano Gundula Janowitz, mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, tenor Jess Thomas, and bass-baritone Walter Berry. 

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 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.

 

Above photo of Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace by Wolfgang Lienbacher .