Lyric Symphony
Gulbenkian Orchestra / Alexander Liebreich
Event Slider
Date
- 20:00 / Cancelled 20:00 / Sold out Thursday, 20:00
- 19:00 / Cancelled 19:00 / Sold out Friday, 19:00
Location
Grand Auditorium Calouste Gulbenkian FoundationPricing
50% – Under 30 years old
15% – Over 65 years old
- Conductor
- Cello
- Soprano
- Baritone
-
Gulbenkian Orchestra
In 1962, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation decided to establish a permanent orchestral ensemble. Originally with only twelve musicians (strings and continuo) it was named “Orquestra de Câmara Gulbenkian”. This collective was successively enlarged and today the “Orquestra Gulbenkian” (the name it has adopted since 1971) has a permanent body of sixty instrumentalists, a number that can be expanded depending on the repertoire.
This structure allows the Gulbenkian Orchestra to interpret works from the Baroque and Classical periods, a significant part of 19th century orchestral literature and much of the music of the 20th century, including works belonging to the current repertoire of the traditional symphonic orchestras. In each season, the orchestra performs on a regular series of concerts at the Gulbenkian Grand Auditorium in Lisbon, where it has had the opportunity of working together with some of leading names of the world of music (conductors and soloists). It has also performed on numerous locations all over Portugal, in an effort to decentralize music and culture.
The orchestra has been constantly expanding its activities in the international level, performing in Europe, Asia Africa, and the Americas. In the recording field, Orquestra Gulbenkian is associated to labels as Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Hyperion, Teldec, Erato, Adès, Nimbus, Lyrinx, Naïve and Pentatone, among others, and this activity was recognized with several international prizes.
-
Alexander Liebreich
Conductor
The 2018/19 season saw Alexander Liebreich begin his tenure as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. He held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (NOSPR) since 2012 until the end of the 2018-2019 season. On October 2021 he takes up the position as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of Orquesta de Valencia. The 2022/2023 season sees Alexander Liebreich begin his tenure as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of Orquesta de Valencia and Artistic Advisor of the Palau de la Música de Valencia.
Alexander Liebreich held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2018 – 2022 and from 2012 to 2019 he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (NOSPR). In 2014 he inaugurated the new “NOSPR” concert hall in Katowice, the orchestra’s home, with a performance including Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Krystian Zimerman. The collaboration with the orchestra and the label Accentus Music features recordings of pieces by Lutosławski alongside other great Polish works. Their third CD release was winner of the International Classical Music Awards 2017 “Best Collection” category, featuring works by Karol Szymanowski and Witold Lutosławski.
He was Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Munich Chamber Orchestra from 2006 – 2016. Their ECM Classics release of Tigran Mansurian’s “Requiem“, with RIAS Kammerchor, received a nomination for a Grammy Award in 2018 and won the ICMA Award 2018 in the category “Contemporary Music”.
In 2018 Alexander Liebreich took over as Artistic Director of the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, opening the first edition in June 2018 with Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Next to that he was elected head of the Richard-Strauss-Society, following Wolfgang Sawallisch and Brigitte Fassbaender in this position. Alexander continues as the Artistic Director until 2023.
As Artistic Director of the festival “Katowice Kultura Natura”, from 2015 – 2018, Alexander Liebreich invited some of Europe’s finest orchestras, ensembles and soloists, including the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra and Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.
Alexander Liebreich one of Germany’s foremost conductors. His extensive career takes him around the world, guest conducting many prestigious orchestras including the Concertgebouw Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Dresden Philharmonic, St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra and Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich.
Recent and upcoming highlights include debuts at the Grafenegg Festival, George Enescu Festival, La Folle Journée in Warsaw, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie and Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon,
He regularly performs with distinguished soloists such as Lisa Batiashvili, Veronika Eberle, Krystian Zimerman, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Gautier Capuçon, Alban Gerhardt, Leila Josefowicz, and Isabelle Faust.
Alongside his concerts and opera performances, Liebreich has established a reputation for producing innovative projects. In 2011 he became the first European Artistic Director of the Tongyeong International Music Festival in South Korea, one of the biggest and most important festivals in Asia. With the goal of encouraging intercultural encounters, he implemented the “east-west-residence- programme”, inviting guest artists like Heiner Goebbels, Unsuk Chin, Martin Grubinger, Toshio Hosokawa and Beat Furrer to South Korea. In October 2016 the Bavarian Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, and Art announced that Alexander Liebreich is the recipient of the Bavarian Culture Prize Special Award.
Alexander Liebreich, was born in Regensburg and studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München and the Salzburg Mozarteum and gained much of his early artistic experience with both Michael Gielen and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He was significantly influenced by his mentor Claudio Abbado, who invited him to join and assist productions at Salzburger Osterfestspiele with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and in Bolzano with the Gustav-Mahler-Jugend Orchestra.
-
Alban Gerhardt
Cello
Having launched his career with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Semyon Bychkov in 1991, Alban Gerhardt has since gained recognition as one of the most versatile cellists, highly regarded for his performances, from solo Bach through the classical and romantic canon to collaborations with several contemporary composers.
For over thirty years, he has made a unique impact on audiences worldwide with his intense musicality, compelling stage presence and insatiable artistic curiosity. His gift for shedding fresh light on familiar scores, along with his appetite for investigating new repertoire from centuries past and present, truly set him apart from his peers.
Notable orchestra collaborations include Concertgebouw Amsterdam, all of the British and German radio orchestras, Berliner Philharmoniker, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Orchestre National de France as well as The Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras, under conductors such as Christoph von Dohnányi, Kurt Masur, Klaus Mäkelä, Christian Thielemann, Simone Young, Susanna Mälkki, Vladimir Jurowski and Andris Nelsons.
Gerhardt has a very wide repertoire including all the core concertos and, at the same time, is the go-to soloist for contemporary composers. He most recently premiered Julian Anderson’s concerto with Orchestre National de France, following on from the success of his performances of Brett Dean’s concerto premiered with Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Berliner Philharmoniker and played with New York Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra amongst others. The upcoming season highlights include Minnesota Orchestra/Halls, Spanish National Orchestra/Young, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/V. Petrenko, and Orquestra Gulbenkian. He will also perform the Asian premiere of the Anderson concerto with Hong Kong Sinfonietta.
Gerhardt has won several awards, and his recording of Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto, released by Deutsche Grammophon, won the BBC Music Magazine Award and was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2015. Gerhardt has recorded extensively for Hyperion; his recording of complete Bach suites was released in 2019 and was one of The Sunday Times top 100 CDs of the year (all genres included). His recent album Shostakovich: Cello Concertos with the WDR Sinfonieorchester, Köln and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, was awarded the International Classical Music Award in 2021.
He is a keen chamber musician; his regular performance partners include Steven Osborne with whom he will perform in North America this season. He has collaborated on a new artistic project, ’Love in Fragments’ with violinist Gergana Gergova, choreographer Sommer Ulrickson, and sculptor Alexander Polzin. A poetic union of music, movement, sculpture and the spoken word, the project successfully premiered at 92 NY in New York.
Gerhardt is passionate about sharing his discoveries with audiences far beyond the traditional concert hall: outreach projects undertaken in Europe and the US have involved performances and workshops, not only in schools and hospitals, but also pioneering sessions in public spaces and young offender institutions.
Alban Gerhardt plays a Matteo Gofriller cello dating from 1710.
-
Johanna Winkel
Soprano
Johanna Winkel initially gained an excellent reputation in the Early Music scene and has since consistently been expanding her stylistic range to include Romantic and Modern repertoire. In concert she has sung with musicAeterna conducted by Teodor Currentzis, the Bonn Beethoven Orchestra conducted by Christof Prick, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Peter Dijkstra, the Cologne WDR Symphony Orchestra and Simon Halsey, Trevor Pinnock, Václav Luks, Jeffrey Tade, Frieder Bernius, Sylvain Cambreling, Alexander Liebreich, Howard Arman, Hans-Christoph Rademann, with the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra and Iván Fischer and many more.
Johanna Winkel also appears regularly on the opera stage. After already having performed the roles of Mimi, Donna Elvira and Micaela during her studies, she went on to sing the roles of Alcina (Handel, Alcina), Rosalinde (J. Strauss, Die Fledermaus), Agathe (Weber, Der Freischütz) and Leonore (Beethoven, Fidelio) at prominent opera houses in Germany to great success. Gerhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre marked her début at the Salzburg Easter Festival under the baton of Christian Thielemann in 2017 and she subsequently repeated this role with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jaap van Zweden and at Semperoper Dresden. After her first performances in 2016, Beethoven’s Leonore as become one of her signature roles and she has reprised it at the 2018 Styriarte Festival under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada and in 2020 with Wroclaw Boroque Orchestra under the baton of Jos van Immerseel.
Johanna Winkel has contributed as a soloist to numerous prizewinning recordings. Her CD releases include Louis Spohr’s Die letzten Dinge with the Bremen Kammerphilharmonie, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, works by Mendelssohn with the Bavarian Radio Choir and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
-
Michael Nagy
Baritone
Michael Nagy, a baritone with Hungarian roots who was born in Stuttgart, began his musical career with the Stuttgart Hymnus Boys’ Choir. He studied singing, lied interpretation and conducting with Rudolf Piernay, Irwin Gage and Klaus Arp in Mannheim and Saarbrücken and enhanced his education by attending master classes held by Charles Spencer, Cornelius Reid and Rudolf Piernay, whom he still consults.
He continues to broaden his repertoire in baritone roles on the world’s major stages: Wolfram in Tannhäuser (Bayreuth Festival), Hans Heiling in H. Marschner’s opera of the same name at the Theater an der Wien and Stolzius in Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (under Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera), Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde) in Baden-Baden and Berlin conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, as well as the title role in Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero in Hamburg and the world premiere of Andreas Lorenzo Scartazzini’s new work Edward II at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Michael Nagy is highly in demand as a concert and oratorio singer around the globe. He has appeared with the most renowned international orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouworkest, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, Orchestre de Paris, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Berlin Konzerthausorchester, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and has performed at various festivals, for instance in Schleswig-Holstein and in the Rheingau, at the Salzburg Festival and the Tanglewood Festival (USA), as well as in Grafenegg and San Sebastian.
In addition, song recitals are a central concert form for the artist. He appears here with a specially conceived program of repertoire by female composers for the first time with Kit Armstrong.
Unsuk Chin
Cello Concerto
— Intermission 20 min —
Alexander Zemlinsky
Lyric Symphony, op. 18
Considered one of the most important German maestros of today, Alexander Liebreich conducted the Munich Chamber Orchestra for ten years, developing a productive rapport that assured him a leading place in European music. In 2018, following his performance of Requiem by Tigran Mansurian, recorded by ECM, he was nominated for a Grammy and became artistic director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. For Gulbenkian Música, he will perform the engaging Lyric Symphony by Zemlinsky, a composer whose rivalry with Mahler meant this work was also considered a response to the acclaimed The Song of the Earth cycle.
Sponsor Gulbenkian Music
Sponsor Gulbenkian Orchestra
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.