Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Chicago

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The Jacobin is an opera in three acts by Antonín Dvo?ák to an original Czech libretto by Marie ?ervinková-Riegrová. ?ervinková-Riegrová took some of the story's characters from the story by Alois Jirásek, "At the Ducal Court", but devised her own plot about them. The first performance was at the National Theatre, Prague, 1889. ?ervinková-Riegrová revised the libretto, with Dvo?ák's permission, in 1894, notably in the last act. Dvo?ák himself revised the music in 1897.

Cécile McLorin Salvant is an American jazz vocalist. She was the winner of the first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, releasing her first album, Cécile, shortly thereafter. Her second album, WomanChild, was released in 2013 on Mack Avenue Records, receiving a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Salvant won four categories in the 2014 Down Beat Critics Poll: Jazz Album of the Year, Female Vocalist, Rising Star–Jazz Artist, and Rising Star–Female Vocalist. Her third album, For One to Love, was released on September 5, 2015, to critical acclaim from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Los Angeles Times. It won her the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2016.

Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre, one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.

Barter Theatre, located in Abingdon, Virginia, opened on June 10, 1933. It is the longest-running professional theatre in the nation. In 1933, when the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, many people could not afford to pay for theater tickets, and many actors had trouble finding employment.

Kelli Christine O'Hara is an American actress and singer. She has appeared on Broadway and Off-Broadway in many musicals since making her Broadway debut as a replacement in Jekyll & Hyde in 2000. She has also acted on television, film and opera, appearing with The Metropolitan Opera. In 2018 she made her West End debut.

Ray Chen is a Taiwanese-Australian violinist. He was the first prize winner in the 2008 International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition and the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Music Competition and now records on the Sony Masterworks label.

Herbert Blomstedt, is a Swedish conductor. Herbert Blomstedt was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and two years after his birth, his Swedish parents moved the family back to their country of origin. He studied at the Stockholm Royal College of Music and the University of Uppsala, followed by studies of contemporary music at Darmstadt in 1949, Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and further conducting studies with Igor Markevitch, Jean Morel at the Juilliard School, and Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center. Blomstedt also lived in Finland during his youth.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was founded by Theodore Thomas in 1891. The ensemble makes its home at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and plays a summer season at the Ravinia Festival. The music director is Riccardo Muti, who began his tenure in 2010. The CSO is one of five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five".

Fisher is a band consisting of songwriter Ron Wasserman and vocalist Kathy Fisher. The band is known for their selling songs through internet marketing; they received a record deal from their success at MP3.com. In 2000, Time magazine said that they were "about to become the biggest Internet-based band ever". Their song "I Will Love You" hit #36 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 chart in 2000. In 2000, it was named the most downloaded song in Internet history.

Alisa Weilerstein is an American classical cellist. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. Weilerstein was born in Rochester, New York. She started playing the cello at age four. She made her debut at age 13 with the Cleveland Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. As a soloist she has performed with a number of other major orchestras on four continents. She also is active in chamber music and performs with her parents, violinist Donald Weilerstein, and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, as the Weilerstein Trio. The trio currently resides at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Her brother is the violinist and conductor Joshua Weilerstein. She is married to Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare.

Michail Vladimirovich Jurowski is a Russian conductor and the son of composer Vladimir Michailovich Jurowski. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Leo Ginzburg and Alexey Kandinsky. He later worked at the Stanislavski Theatre and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Jurowski was assistant to Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.

Leif Ove Andsnes is a Norwegian pianist and chamber musician. Andsnes has made several recordings for Virgin and EMI. For his current "Beethoven Journey" project, Andsnes performed and recorded all five of the composer’s piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra; they have been released on Sony Classical. He is represented by IMG.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the romantic period, whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. He was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a 2001 fantasy film directed by Chris Columbus and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. The film is the first instalment in the long-running Harry Potter film series, and was written by Steve Kloves and produced by David Heyman. Its story follows Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as he discovers that he is a famous wizard and begins his education. The film stars Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, with Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione Granger.

El?na Garan?a is a Latvian mezzo-soprano. She began to study singing in her hometown of Riga in 1996 and continued her studies in Vienna and in the United States. By 1999 she had won first place in a significant competition in Finland and had begun a career in Europe. Worldwide engagements followed her 2003 Salzburg Festival appearances.

Hilary Hahn is an American violinist. In her active international career she has performed throughout the world both as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors and as a recitalist. She also has built a reputation for championing contemporary music. Several composers have written works especially for her, including concerti by Edgar Meyer and Jennifer Higdon and partitas by Antón García Abril.

John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. With a career spanning over six decades, he has composed some of the most popular and recognizable film scores in cinematic history, including the Star Wars series, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, the first two Home Alone films, the first two Jurassic Park films, Schindler's List, and the first three Harry Potter films. Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but three of his feature films. Other notable works by Williams include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, "The Mission" theme used by NBC News and Seven News in Australia, the television series Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, and the incidental music for the first season of Gilligan's Island. Williams has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles a

Leonidas Kavakos is a Greek violinist and conductor. As a violinist, he has won prizes at several international violin competitions, including the Sibelius, Paganini, and Indianapolis competitions. He has also recorded for record labels such as Sony/BMG and BIS. As a conductor, he was an artistic director of the Camerata Salzburg and has been a guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff, based on 24 poems from the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis. It was first performed by the Oper Frankfurt on 8 June 1937. It is part of Trionfi, a musical triptych that also includes Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The first and last section of the piece are called "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" and start with the very well known "O Fortuna".

Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and music director-designate of the San Francisco Symphony.

The Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, was completed by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886 at what was probably the artistic peak of his career. It is also popularly known as the Organ Symphony, even though it is not a true symphony for organ, but simply an orchestral symphony where two sections out of four use the pipe organ. The composer inscribed it as: Symphonie No. 3 "avec orgue".

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote 23 original concertos for piano and orchestra. These works, many of which Mozart composed for himself to play in the Vienna concert series of 1784–86, held special importance for him.

Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler was composed in 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at Mahler's holiday cottage at Maiernigg. Among its most distinctive features are the trumpet solo that opens the work with a rhythmic motif similar to the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the horn solos in the third movement and the frequently performed Adagietto.

Valery Abisalovich Gergiev, is a Russian conductor and opera company director of Ossetian origin. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.

Yo-Yo Ma is a French-born American cellist. Born in Paris, he spent his schooling years in New York City and was a child prodigy, performing from the age of four and a half. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University and has enjoyed a prolific career as both a soloist performing with orchestras around the world and a recording artist. He has recorded more than 90 albums and received 18 Grammy Awards.

(Achille) Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian Baroque musical composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, and priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, he is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe. He composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons.

Emanuel Ax is a Grammy-winning American classical pianist. He is a teacher on the faculty of the Juilliard School.

The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot," though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is a German violinist. She was supported early in her career by Herbert von Karajan, and has had several works composed specially for her, including ones by Sebastian Currier, Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutos?awski, Norbert Moret, Krzysztof Penderecki, André Previn, Wolfgang Rihm, and John Williams.

Jean Sibelius, born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius, was a Finnish composer and violinist of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely recognized as his country's greatest composer and, through his music, is often credited with having helped Finland to develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia.

Joseph Maurice Ravel French:; 7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937 was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Riccardo Muti, OMRI is an Italian conductor. He currently holds two music directorships, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. He has previously held posts at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. Muti has been a prolific recording artist, and has received dozens of honours, titles, awards and prizes. He is especially associated with the music of Giuseppe Verdi.