NIKOLAI LUGANSKY PERFORMS RACHMANINOFF’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3

THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA MAKES ITS STRATHMORE DEBUT ON MAY 26

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Brenda Kean Tabor
April 12, 2010
(202) 533-1886
(202) 533-1886
btabor@wpas.org

Washington, D.C. – The 109-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra makes its debut at North Bethesda’s Music Center at Strathmore on May 26, treating the audience to the unique Philadelphia sound in Strathmore’s beautiful and acoustically fine-tuned hall.

Fresh, dynamic and at the forefront of music, The New York Times has described the orchestra as “a storied American institution that lifted classical music to new heights of public awareness when Leopold Stokowski conducted it for the 1940 Disney film Fantasia and has remained one of the world’s finest musical ensembles.” Said Allan Kozinn in an October 2009 New York Times review, “When Mr. Dutoit and his players performed at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening, they made it seem as if the orchestra’s horizons were cloud free and its only concern was producing the big, rich, shapely sound for which it was famous for most of the 20th century.

This year’s WPAS program focuses on works by Glinka and Stravinsky, bookending the perhaps infamous (and beautiful) Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3, to be performed here by Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky, who has been performing the complete Rachmaninoff cycle with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Britain this season. The Guardian wrote of his performance there of Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto last November, “Lugansky played it with debonair charm and breathtaking dexterity.”

The concerto gained fame in the movie Shine about the mental instability of pianist David Helfgott. Said the Orange County Register in a review of Lugansky’s performance of the concerto there last winter, “Rachmaninoff wrote it as a showpiece for his first American tour in 1909. By one musician's count, the work asks a pianist to play more than 28,000 notes. Think of it as the Super Bowl of concertos, representing the biggest, strongest, most athletic and most masculine of pianistic challenges.” For Lugansky, the critic added, the concerto was like “child’s play. Lugansky walked, trotted and galloped through the work with an astonishing range of dynamics and keyboard colors.”

Born in Moscow, Nikolai Lugansky studied at Moscow’s Central School of Music. Known especially for his superb Rachmaninoff interpretations, Lugansky has recorded extensively on a number of labels to critical acclaim. The Observer wrote of Lugansky’s CD of Beethoven Sonatas that his “highly individual approach, [is] as alert to the composer’s intentions as to his own remarkable gifts…As light of touch as he is sensitive to nuance, Lugansky brings to these works the honesty and craftsmanship which are fast becoming his trademarks.” Said the Cincinnati Enquirer of a recent concert in Frankfurt, Germany, “The Russian pianist’s playing was as spectacular for the subtlety of color and atmosphere he achieved as it was for his ability to tackle cascades of fiendishly difficult virtuosities…. The normally reserved German audience cheered, stomped their feet and applauded in rhythmic unison until the pianist supplied an encore, a glittering Prelude by Rachmaninoff.” The Guardian described Lugansky’s London performance last year of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 as “thrilling” and “impressive” and his performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as employing “subtle colourings to shade fearsome piano writing—the kind where many players would be satisfied just to subdue Prokofiev's armfuls of notes.” A New York Times review of Lugansky’s performance of Prokofiev’s Sixth Piano Sonata said Lugansky “played with total command, vivid imagination and, at times, terrifying power.”

Lugansky frequently performs as a soloist, in recitals and with major orchestras throughout the world, including the Philharmonia, the Tokyo and the Los Angeles Philharmonics, the London, BBC, Cincinnati and San Francisco symphony orchestras
and the Royal Concertgebouw, among others. He has worked with numerous distinguished
conductors including Riccardo Chailly, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Vladimir
Jurowski and Kurt Masur, and last year toured with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
The concert is conducted by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Adviser Charles Dutoit, who is also artistic director and principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Artistic Director for three seasons of the Sapporo Pacific Music Festival, Charles Dutoit is also presently the Artistic Director of the Miyazaki International Music Festival in Japan and Artistic Director of the Canton International Summer Music Academy (CISMA) in Guangzhou, China, which he founded in 2005. In July 2009, he also became Music Director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra in his native Switzerland. He also conducts regularly at Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin and has led productions at the Los Angeles Opera and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

From 1977 to 2002, Dutoit was artistic director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1980, and from 1990 led the orchestra in its summer concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. He was also director of the orchestra’s concerts at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia for a decade. Dutoit regularly collaborates with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Cleveland symphony orchestras. He also performs regularly with the great orchestras of Europe, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, as well as the Israel Philharmonic and the major orchestras of Japan, South America and Australia.

From 1991 to 2001, Dutoit was music director of the Orchestre National de France. In 1996, he was appointed principal conductor, and in 1998, music director, of the NHK Symphony in Tokyo.

Mr. Dutoit has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, Erato and other labels with American, European and Japanese orchestras. His more than 170 recordings, half of them with the Montreal Symphony, have garnered more than 40 awards and distinctions.

High-resolution photographs are available at http://www.wpas.org
Funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

WPAS is committed to making every event accessible for persons with disabilities. Please call the WPAS Ticket Services Office for more information on accessibility to the various theaters in which our performances are held. Services offered vary from venue to venue and may require advance notice.

Washington Performing Arts Society has created profound opportunities for connecting the community to artists, in both education and performance. Through live events in venues that criss-cross the landscape of the D.C. metropolitan area, the careers of emerging artists are guided, and established artists who have bonded with the local audience are invited to return. In this way, the space between artists and audiences is eliminated, so that all may share life-long opportunities to deepen their cultural knowledge, enrich their lives, and expand their understanding and compassion of the world through the universal language of the arts.