JAMES CONLON

Internationally recognized as one of the leading conductors on the contemporary scene, James Colon, in the span of his career, has conducted in almost all of North America and in all European music capitals. He is Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera, the Ravinia Festival, summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest choral music festival in the United States. He was Principal Conductor ofOpera National de Paris (1995-2004) for longer than any other conductor, General Music Director of the City of Cologne in Germany (1989-2002), also holding the positions of Music Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra andOpera in Cologne. He was also Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (1983-1991). Since his debut in 1976, he has conducted more than 250 performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Known for his interpretations of Wagner′s repertoire since the beginning of his tenure in 2006 at the Los Angeles Opera, he has sought to establish a Wagner tradition to Los Angeles. In five years he has conducted seven Wagner operas, including the Ring cycle. For one month, the Ring Festival was held throughout the city, with the collaboration of 125 cultural institutions. In June 2010 he conducted three Ring cycles at the Los Angeles Opera. This series will follow up on Wagner's bicentennial in 2013 and will continue into the future. Conlon is currently conducting a tribute to Benjamin Britten over the course of three years, culminating in November 2013 on the 100th anniversary of the composer′s birth with a concert of the War Requiem and a similar Britten Festival to that of Wagner. A longtime devotee from of Britten′s music, he will conduct some of his works in the United States and Europe in upcoming seasons, including The Turn of the Screw, Albert Herring, Morte to Venice and The rape of Lucretia at the Los Angeles Opera, and to Midsummer Night′s Dream at the Teatro dell′Opera in Rome. The tribute includes symphonic and choral works with the NDR Sinfonie Orchester in Hamburg, with the Orchestre National de France to Paris, with the Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, La Scala Philharmonic, and Symphonic Montreal. With the aim of disseminating the works of composers suppressed by the Nazi regime, he devoted himself to programming their music in North America and Europe: at the Ravinia Festival with the Breaking the Silence series and at the Los Angeles Opera with Recovered Voices. For his efforts in bringing the music of these composers to international attention, he received the Crystal Globe award from the Anti-defamation League (ADL) and the Zemlisky Prize. He is also the founder and Artistic Advisor of the Orel Foundation, an organization dedicated to to highlighting and to representing the works of these composers. He has recorded for major record companies and received numerous awards. He has appeared in several television series and at the Metropolitan Opera in performances presented on DVD. Most recently he presented together Zemlisky's Der Zweg , Ullmann's Der zerbrochene Krug and Braunfels' Die Vögel , recorded on DVD. He received two Grammy Awards (best Classical Recording and Best Opera Album) for Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny , a Los Angeles production Opera, released on DVD. He was appointed Officier de l′Ordre des Arts and Lettres by the French government in 1996 and in 2004 promoted to Commander. In 2002 he received France′s highest award from the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, the Legion of Honor. For Festival dei Due Mondi in 2009 he conducted Gianni Schicchi directed by Woody Allen and in 2011 he conducted the Final Concert in Piazza Duomo.

MATT AUCOIN

Matt Aucoin is a composer, conductor, poet and pianist. Earning a degree "Summa cum laude" in Literature from Harvard University in 2012, he will be Assistant Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera to New York in the fall. He is music director and composer of the Encounters Ensemble at the Peabody Essex Museum and will make his debut with the Longwood Symphony in Boston this August. In the fall Aucoin will continue his composition studies at the Juilliard School to New York. His operas Hart Crane and From Sandover have been performed at the American Repertory Theater and the New York Composers′ Collaborative, respectively. Aucoin was also music director of Dunster House Opera (2010-12), for which he conducted Johann Strauss′ Die Fledermaus and Mozart′s Le Nozze di Figaro , translating the libretto into English. He has also held the positions of Music Director of Opera Boston Underground, Assistant Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, Assistant Conductor of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and coach/repetiteur at the Caramoor Festival, at the Boston Lyric Opera and atOpera Manhattan. He has received numerous awards, including the Louis Sudler Prize (for the student with "the best artistic potential at Harvard"), the Hoopes Prize, the MacColl Prize for Composition (2010 and 2012), the Helen Choate Bell Prize, and the John Harvard Scholarship.

TAMARA GURA

Tamara Gura immediately captures the attention of anyone who hears her because of her extremely individual dark-toned mezzo-soprano d′agility voice and the naturalness of her stage presence. In the 2010/11 season she made her successful debuts at the SemperOper in Dresden as Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and at the English National Opera in London as Hermia in the new production of to Midsummer Night´s Dream by Benjamin Britten staged from Christopher Alden. from December 2011 she performs her first Angelina in Rossini´s La Cenerentola at the Landestheater in Salzburg with the Mozarteum Orchestra, under the musical direction of Leo Hussain. In June 2012 she sings the role of Hermia in a new production by Paul Curran at the Teatro dell´Opera in Rome, under the musical direction of James Conlon.

Tamara Gura began her studies at a very young age with lessons in theater, dance, singing and piano. She made her debut on the opera stage under the musical direction of Nello Santi and directed by Grischa Asagaroff atOpera in Zurich, where she was part of the prestigious Opera Studio. She received several awards, such as the Metropolitan Opera National Council Award or the Semans Art Fund Grant for Foreign Study in Salzburg, and was chosen from Eva Wagner-Pasquier to be part of the "Académie européenne de musique" in Aix-en-Provence.

The young singer has already worked with leading conductors such as Simone Young, Ingo Metzmacher, Alessandro De Marchi, Stefan Soltesz, Alan Curtis, Cornelius Meister and Vladimir Fedoseyev. Tamara Gura was a member of theOpera Studio atOpera in Hamburg. Among the roles from she has performed are Sesto in Julius Caesar in Egypt, Zaida in the new production of Il Turco in Italia staged from Christof Loy, Pauline in La Dama di Picche, Valletto in L´incoronazione di Poppea , and Gymnasiast in a new production, directed by Peter Konwitschny, of Alban Berg´s Lulu, a role she reprised at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

From 2007 to 2010 he was a soloist with the company of the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he played such important roles as Idamante, Dorabella, Cherubino, Radamisto, Zerlina, Hänsel, Wellgunde and Rossweisse(Der Ring des Nibelungen).

Tamara Gura also carries out an intensive concert activity. She made her debut in France with Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco in the role of Tangia in Gluck´s The Chinese Women. She sang with Jan Willem de Vriend´s Combattimento Consort in the role of Mary Magdalene in Händels´ Resurrection to Amsterdam, performed Piacere in The Triumph of Time and Disenchantment by the same composer under the baton of Andreas Spering, and the role of Vagaus in Vivaldi´s oratorio Juditha Triumphans under the baton of George Petrou. She sang at the prestigious Dresden Musikfestspiele Festival the role of Gismonda in Lotti´s Theophane with members of the Dresdner Staatskapelle. She was invited to to sing at the Hamburg Staatsoper, the SemperOper in Dresden and the Stuttgart Staatsoper. Her future engagements include the title role in Ariodante and Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte. She is fluent in Italian, French, English and German.

BERNINI QUARTET

The Bernini Quartet was born to Rome in 1992. After absorbing the teachings of Piero Farulli, viola player of the famous Quartetto Italiano, and following Master-classes in Europe of the Melos, Amadeus, Berg, Tokyo, Cherubini and La Salle Quartets, after multiple experiences gained, from ancient music to to contemporary music, the Quartetto Bernini felt more and more the need to focus its activity around the great classical repertoire. It has sought to probe and rediscover those sonorities and color that inspired the great composers of the past by proposing a reading attentive to the performance practice of the time using original instruments with tuning to 430 hz, historical strings and gut strings. It is precisely in this direction that the Quartetto Bernini, alongside the most important works of the international repertoire, intends to research and resurface works of considerable interest for Italian string quartets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, today little known or even unknown; well-known composers such as Boccherini, Cherubini, Paganini, Rossini, but also others such as Cambini, Radicati and Rolla.

In 2003 he created the Festival "Les Fleurs Bleues, musical pages around the String Quartet," which over the years has become a landmark to Rome for music from chamber.

Ennio Morricone awarded him the prestigious "Michelangelo Prize 1999" for special artistic merit, given in previous editions to Goffredo Petrassi, Renzo Piano, Alberto Sordi and Ennio Morricone himself.

The Quartet has toured North and South America, Europe, the Middle and Far East, and has performed in the most prestigious concert seasons including alongside internationally renowned concert artists such as Christophe Coin, Mario Brunello, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Alessandro Carbonare, Bruno Canino, Roberto Prosseda and Alain Meunier. He has recorded J. S. Bach′s "The Art of the Fugue" and Donizetti′s Quartets. The CD, for Universal, of Mozart′s two Quartets with Piano (Roberto Prosseda) received outstanding reviews from the specialized press. On the other hand, the first CD dedicated to Mozart′s String Quartets (KV80, 155, 157, 168 and 173) is very recently released, also for Universal.

The Bernini Quartet is currently engaged in the monumental integral project of string quartets by W. to. Mozart that it is performing in several Italian and foreign cities. Since 1998 it has been Quartet in Residence at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, with which it collaborates intensively both to concert and teaching level at the School of String Instruments from established by them. It has also given master classes at several American universities, and at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia. Its members have the privilege of playing four prestigious instruments: Violins Nicolò Amati, Cremona 1661 and Pietro Guarneri, Venice 1734; viola Giovanni & Francesco Grancino, Milan 1691; cello C. to. Testore, Milan 1758.

SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA OF MILAN GIUSEPPE VERDI

Founded in 1993 from Vladimir Delman, it has established itself as one of the most relevant national symphonic ensembles ranging from Bach to the cornerstones of nineteenth-century symphonism and up to twentieth-century music. The orchestra′s program schedule includes more than thirty programs each year, alongside less usual events such as Crescendo in Musica, an important review for children and young people. From 1999 to 2005 Riccardo Chailly, now honorary conductor, served as music director; Maestro Rudolf Barshai, who recently passed away, succeeded him as conductor emeritus in the 2006/2007 season to Carlo Maria Giulini; in 2008/2009 Wayne Marshall and Helmut Rilling assumed the role of principal guest conductors; and since 2009/2010 China′s Zhang Xian has been music director, with Ruben Jais as resident conductor. Principal conductor, since 2011/2012, has been American John Axelrod. With Mahler′s Symphony No. 2 Resurrection, conducted from Riccardo Chailly, in 1999 the orchestra inaugurated its new permanent home - the Auditorium in Milan - considered one of Italy′s best from concert halls. In 1998 the orchestra formed the Giuseppe Verdi Symphonic Chorus of Milan, led until his passing by Maestro Romano Gandolfi, a prestigious figure in choral conducting with the greatest conductors and in the most important opera houses in the world. The choir currently has one hundred members capable of tackling the great lyrical-symphonic repertoire, from the Baroque to the twentieth century; choirmaster is currently Erina Gambarini. Recurring appointments of the orchestra are the performance of one of Bach′s great Passions near the Easter holidays and Beethoven′s Ninth Symphony as a New Year′s concert. The orchestra has been conducted by, among others from Riccardo Chailly, Georges Prêtre, Riccardo Muti, Valery Gergiev, Rudolf Barshai, Claus Peter Flor, Christopher Hogwood, Helmut Rilling, Peter Maag, Marko Letonja, Daniele Gatti, Roberto Abbado, Ivor Bolton, Kazushi Ono, Vladimir Jurowski, Yakov Kreizberg, Ulf Schirmer, Eiji Oue; also recall Herbert Blomstedt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Leonard Slatkin, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Wayne Marshall, Sir Neville Marriner, Oleg Caetani, Martin Haselböck, Alan Buribayev, Aldo Ceccato, Giuseppe Grazioli, Ion Marin, Juanjo Mena, Paul Daniel. And he has collaborated with soloists such as Martha Argerich, Nelson Freire, Mstislav Rostropovich, Vadim Repin, Lynn Harrell, Viktoria Mullova, Han-Na Chang, Sarah Chang, Midori, Alexander Kobrin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Salvatore Accardo, Mario Brunello, Enrico Dindo, Alexander Toradze, Hilary Hahn, Radovan Vlatkovic, Helene Grimaud, Luis Bacalov, Salvatore Accardo, Roberto Cominati, Emanuele Arciuli, Natasha Korsakova, Gianluca Cascioli, Yefim Bronfman, Massimo Quarta, Yuri Bashmet, Francesca Dego, Steven Isserlis, Hüseyin Sermet, Sol Gabetta, Alison Balsom, Kolja Blacher, Benedetto Lupo, Daniel Müller-Schott, Martin Fröst. Recording more than twenty-five CDs for Decca, Emi, RCA, DG, Arts, Sugar Music, Universal Music, the Verdi Orchestra has also developed an intensive recording activity.

THE COMPOSERS.

FRANZ SCHREKER

(Principality of Monaco, March 23, 1878 - Berlin, March 21, 1934)

Oldest son of a family of Jewish descent that converted to Catholicism. After his father´s death, the family moved in 1888 to Vienna, where Schreker entered the University of Music and Arts. He studied violin and composition with Robert Fuchs and in a short time achieved his first success: Intermezzo op. 8 for strings , which won major recognition and awards. Around 1907 he founded the Philharmonic Choral Society, which he directed for thirteen years, and in the same year he took over as co-director of the Vienna Volksoper. In 1912 l´opera Der ferne Klang was well received, and in the same year he received the post of professor of composition at the Viennese Akademie für Musik. Since 1920 he has been director of the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. He is primarily a composer of works, and his style is characterized by the coexistence of different tendencies, from Romanticism to Symbolism, via Impressionism and experimentation with timbres and tonalities. Among his major compositions it is worth mentioning the works Der Ferne Klang (1903), Die Gezeichneten (1912) and the compositions for orchestra Andante (1900), Intermezzo (1902); also important are his music for choir and from chamber music (Lieder and pieces for various ensembles).

ALEXANDER VON ZEMLINSKY

(Vienna, Oct. 14, 1871-New York, March 15, 1942)

An Austrian composer, he graduated from the Vienna Conservatory, where he met and befriended Arnold Schönberg, his great admirer and future husband of his sister Mathilde. Zemlinsky became music director of the Prague StateOpera in 1911, later rector of the Deutsche Akademie für Musik und Bildende Kunst and principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Considered the musical heir of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, the Viennese musician had a long infatuation with Alma Mahler Schindler before she became wife of the great Bohemian musician. Despite his great friendship with Arnold Schoenberg and other Viennese musicians, he is basically unattracted to dodecaphony. In addition to his work as a musician, Zemlinsky deals in a modern way with pedagogy. to he is credited with musical poems composed on works by Christian Morgenstern, Maurice Maeterlinck by Rabindranath Tagore and Wilde. Zemlinsky´s experience is that of a great conductor who, together to Mahler, contributes to renew the theater d´opera.

It′s an activity that is interrupted by Nazism, which deals an irreparable blow to a line of interpretation that sought to combine the modern with tradition. Zemlinsky remained in Germany until 1933, then emigrated to America, where he died in 1942.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY

(Hamburg, February 3, 1809 - Leipzig, November 4, 1847)

Born in Hamburg Feb. 3, 1809 from a very wealthy and cultured Jewish family, he received a thorough humanistic and musical education. Passionate about music, he learned to to play the piano from his mother. A child prodigy, to nine years old he performs in public as a pianist. At a very young age he meets Goethe, and a stimulating friendship develops between the great poet and the boy. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, Felix Mendelssohn composed numerous works of symphonic and sacred music. Luigi Cherubini, then director of the Paris Conservatory, convinces his father to to let him pursue a musical career, giving up plans to make him a businessman. to seventeen, the young composer presents his first masterpiece, the Midsummer Night′s Dream Overture. Returning to Berlin in 1926, Felix Mendelssohn enrolled at the university bringing back the music of the incredibly forgotten Johann Sebastian Bach, whose performance of The Passion according to Matthew he conducted in 1829. From 1829 to 1832 Mendelssohn traveled to England, Switzerland, France and Italy, performing as pianist, organist and conductor: he performed and conducted Mozart (his idol along with Bach), Haydn, Weber, Beethoven, Schubert and other greats. Thanks to the fame he gained, in 1840 he was appointed conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a famous and distinguished concert institution. Also to Leipzig Felix Mendelssohn founded a conservatory, opened in 1843, of which he became director, teacher of piano and composition. Despite a happy life, in his later years his health is rather frail. He will die of a heart attack to only thirty-eight years old, on November 4, 1847 to Leipzig.

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