The Orchestra Now Opens Carnegie Hall Season With Stravinsky’s Suite from The Fairy’s Kiss, Thursday, November 14

First New York City Performances of Works by Honegger and Mitropoulos in More Than 50 Years 

Free Concert Series: The Orchestra Now Also Performs Works by Mendelssohn, Ravel, and Mozart in Hudson on November 24

The Orchestra Now will begin its season at Carnegie Hall on November 14 with seldom-heard performances of four works from the late 1920s that give insight into the evolving world of orchestral music 90 years ago. The program will also be performed on November 13 as part of the Ensemble’s Fisher Center series at Bard College.

The evening includes the suite from Stravinsky’s ballet score The Fairy’s Kiss, written as an homage to Tchaikovsky and based on Hans Christian Andersen's short story Isjomfruen (The Ice-Maiden). Marking their first New York City performances in more than 50 years are Honegger’s Rugby, which was written to evoke the sport of rugby and is the second of the composer's three "mouvements symphoniques;" and Mitropoulos’ 1929 Concerto Grosso, considered by the composer to be his best work. Rounding out the program is Othmar Schoeck’s song cycle Buried Alive, adapted from Gottfried Keller’s poem Lebendig Begraben, about a man who wakes up to find he has been buried by mistake. German baritone Michael Nagy, who recently appeared as Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte at Zurich Opera House, is the soloist.

Also in November, a FREE concert led by Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman will offer an afternoon of selections from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 (November 24, Hudson Hall, Hudson, New York).

The next concert at Carnegie Hall is Into the Wilderness, a program featuring the NYC premiere of César Franck’s beautiful What You Hear on the Mountain (April 30, 2020 at Carnegie Hall).

Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss
Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 7 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Michael Nagy, baritone
Honegger: Rugby*
Schoeck: Buried Alive
Mitropoulos: Concerto Grosso*
Stravinsky: Divertimento, The Fairy's Kiss Suite
*First NYC performances in over 50 years
This concert will also be performed at the Fisher Center at Bard on November 13.

Tickets priced at $25–$60 are available online at carnegiehall.org, by calling CarnegieCharge at 212.247.7800, or at the Carnegie Hall box office at 57th & Seventh Ave.

The Orchestra Now
The Orchestra Now (TON) is a group of 65 vibrant young musicians from 12 different countries across the globe: Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Peru, Taiwan, Ukraine, the U.K., and the U.S. All share a mission to make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences by sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Hand-picked from the world’s leading conservatories—including The Juilliard School, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and the Curtis Institute of Music—the members of TON are enlightening curious minds by giving on-stage introductions and demonstrations, writing concert notes from the musicians’ perspective, and having one-on-one discussions with patrons during intermissions.

Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, whom The New York Times said “draws rich, expressive playing from the orchestra,” founded TON in 2015 as a graduate program at Bard College, where he is also president. TON offers both a three-year master’s degree in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and a two-year advanced certificate in Orchestra Studies. The orchestra’s home base is the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center at Bard, where they perform multiple concerts each season and take part in the annual Bard Music Festival. They also perform regularly at the finest venues in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others across NYC and beyond. HuffPost, who has called TON’s performances “dramatic and intense,” praises these concerts as “an opportunity to see talented musicians early in their careers.” 

The Orchestra has performed with many distinguished guest conductors and soloists, including Neeme Järvi, Vadim Repin, Fabio Luisi, Peter Serkin, Gerard Schwarz, Tan Dun, Zuill Bailey, and JoAnn Falletta. In the 2019–20 season, conductors Leonard Slatkin and Hans Graf will also lead TON performances. Recordings featuring The Orchestra Now include Ferdinand Ries piano concertos with Piers Lane on Hyperion Records, and a Sorel Classics concert recording of pianist Anna Shelest performing works by Anton Rubinstein with TON and conductor Neeme Järvi. Upcoming albums include a second release with Piers Lane on Hyperion Records in the spring of 2020. Recordings of TON’s live concerts from the Fisher Center can be heard on Classical WMHT-FM and WWFM The Classical Network, and are featured regularly on Performance Today, broadcast nationwide. In 2019, the orchestra’s performance with Vadim Repin was live-streamed on The Violin Channel.

For upcoming activities and more detailed information about the musicians, visit theorchestranow.org.

Leon Botstein
Leon Botstein brings a renowned career as both a conductor and educator to his role as music director of The Orchestra Now. He has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992, artistic co-director of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival since their creation, and president of Bard College since 1975. He was the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 2003–11 and is now conductor laureate. In 2018, he assumed artistic directorship of Campus Grafenegg and Grafenegg Academy in Austria. Mr. Botstein is also a frequent guest conductor with orchestras around the globe, has made numerous recordings, and is a prolific author and music historian. He is editor of the prestigious The Musical Quarterly and has received many honors for his contributions to music. More info online at LeonBotstein.com.