Reference Recordings: The Utah Symphony 75th Anniversary Concert at Carnegie Hall!

Thierry Fischer
Photo Credit: Kousaku Nakagawa

The Utah Symphony and music director Thierry Fischer perform at Carnegie Hall April 29th in a concert celebrating the orchestra's 75th anniversary. The program features the New York premiere of American composer Andrew Norman's Percussion Concerto, Switch, with Scottish soloist Colin Currie, commissioned by the Utah Symphony and Mr. Fischer, and includes Haydn's Symphony No. 96 in D major, "Miracle," Bartók's Suite from the Miraculous Mandarin, and selections from the ballet score Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev.

The Utah Symphony and Mr. Fischer gave the world premiere of Switch on November 6, 2016 at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City. About Switch, Mr. Norman, a finalist at age 32 for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music, says "the percussionist's many instruments act as triggers, turning other players on and off, making them play forward and backward, and causing them to jump to entirely different musical worlds." The work is, he continues, "a game of control. Each percussion instrument (both in front of and behind the orchestra) is a switch that controls other instruments in specific ways, making them play louder or softer, higher or lower, freezing them in place and setting them in motion again."

This Utah Symphony concert also marks the 50th anniversary of the orchestra's debut at Carnegie Hall in 1966, during the tenure of the orchestra's visionary music director Maurice Abravanel. In the 2015-16 season Mr. Fischer concludes performances of the complete cycle of Gustav Mahler's symphonies, a two-season tribute to Abravanel, a noted Mahlerian under whose baton the Utah Symphony was the first American orchestra to record all of Mahler's symphonies, a landmark achievement. Standing in this tradition, music director Mr. Fischer and the Utah Symphony performed-and recorded live-Mahler's Symphony No. 1, "Titan." The recording was issued on Reference Recordings in fall 2015 and forms part of a recording program re-instituted by Mr. Fischer.

Find out more at www.carnegiehall.org!