Welcome to NOI+F at Home!
This year, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center will deliver the National Orchestral Institute + Festival at Home! Throughout June 2020, NOI+F students will continue their orchestral training virtually and audiences will experience in-depth conversations through NOI+F at Noon streams, the virtual SPARK! Lounge and Saturday evening Philharmonic broadcasts.
Michael Stern led a triumphant conclusion to the 2019 NOI+F with music by Anna Clyne and Gustav Mahler. Clyne’s turbulent "This Midnight Hour" is based on poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Charles Baudelaire and evokes a surreal nocturnal scene. Mahler’s towering fifth symphony is an emotional journey from its exposed beginning to its triumphant finale. Enjoy these gripping and passionate performances by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic!
About the National Orchestral Institute + Festival
The University of Maryland’s National Orchestral Institute + Festival brings together aspiring orchestral musicians from across the country for a month of dynamic music-making and professional exploration. Chosen through a rigorous, cross-country audition process, these young artists present passionate and awe-inspiring performances of adventuresome repertoire at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and in the College Park, MD community. In 2019, conductor David Alan Miller and the NOI+F Philharmonic received a Grammy nomination in the “Best Orchestral Performance” category for their Naxos recording Ruggles, Stucky, Harbison.
About the Artists
Michael Stern, conductor
Recognized as one of the most dynamic American conductors of his generation, Michael Stern was recently named Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Stern is also the founding Music Director of The IRIS Chamber Orchestra. Under Stern's direction the orchestra has been unanimously heralded for its varied programming, with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. In North America, Stern has conducted the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Chicago, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, Atlanta, Houston, Baltimore, Toronto, Cincinnati, Montreal, Indianapolis and National Symphonies, among many others. In 2000, Mr. Stern concluded his tenure as the chief conductor of Germany’s Saarbrucken Radio Symphony; he was the first American to hold the post. From 1991-1995, he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon.
Photo by Todd Rosenberg
Anna Clyne, composer
London-born Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” in a New York Times profile and as “dazzlingly inventive” by Time Out New York, Clyne’s work often includes collaborations with cutting-edge choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers and musicians.
This season features multiple premieres of new works, including Sound and Fury and Overflow with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, where Clyne serves as Associate Composer. Spring 2020 sees the world premiere of Clyne’s COLOR FIELD, an orchestral work inspired by Mark Rothko’s paintings, with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; and Breathing Statues with the Calidore String Quartet. Other recent premieres include her Rumi-inspired cello concerto, DANCE, premiered by Inbal Segev at the 2019 Cabrillo Festival, conducted by Cristian Macelaru; and Three Sisters, her mandolin concerto for Avi Avital and the Kremerata Baltica. In July 2019, Clyne wrote and arranged music from Nico’s Marble Index for The Nico Project, a theatrical work presented by the Manchester International Festival.
Clyne served as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, and Berkeley Symphony. Clyne currently serves as The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Associate Composer through the 2020- 2021 season, with a series of works commissioned over three years.
Her music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. boosey.com/clyne
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
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Photo by Christina Kernohan
Gustav Mahler, composer
Born at Kaliste in Bohemia, the son of a Jewish pedlar, Gustav Mahler later described himself as three times homeless, a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the world, everywhere an intruder, never welcomed. His principal musical training was at the Vienna Conservatory, after which he embarked on a career as a conductor which took him to important positions in Budapest, Hamburg and finally at the Vienna State Opera, where he made a number of major reforms. Hostility fomented by sections of the press forced his resignation in 1907, after which he briefly continued a distinguished international career as a conductor, notably in New York, until his death in 1911. As a composer Mahler wrote symphonies that absorbed into their texture and form the tradition of German song in music that reflected in many ways the spirit of the time in which he lived, in all its variety.
Reprinted from Naxos Records