UK Orchestra to Perform Side-By-Side With Cincinnati’s

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 27, 2018) — The critically acclaimed University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro John Nardolillo, will continue its centennial concert season with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 featuring a side-by-side performance with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and French conductor Louis Langrée.

The program includes Jean Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture, Johannes Brahms’ “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” and Leonard Bernstein’s overture to “Candide.” Lexington native and Los Angeles Philharmonic Associate Concertmaster Nathan Cole will serve as a guest concertmaster. The concert will begin 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 28, at the Singletary Center for the Arts.

Louis Langrée has been music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra since 2013. He recently toured with them in Asia and Europe with appearances at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, BBC Proms (London) and La Seine Musicale (Paris). He is also music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York, a position he has held since 2002. At the festival in 2018, he led their celebration of the Bernstein Centenary, including a staged performance of “Mass.” Recent and future conducting projects include Langrée’s debuts with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the Prague Spring Festival, Orchestre National de France and the Konzerthaus Berlin Orchestra. Return engagements include the Wiener Symphoniker, Orchestre des Champs-Elysées and the Philadelphia, Toronto Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras. He will return to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Wiener Staatsoper and Opéra Comique in Paris. Langrée has conducted several world premieres including works by Daníel Bjarnason, Magnus Lindberg and Caroline Shaw. During the 2018-19 season, he will conduct the first performance of a piece by Jonathan Bailey Holland, composer-in-residence with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Langrée has conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker and London Philharmonic Orchestras. He has worked with many other orchestras around the world including the Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Santa Cecilia in Rome, Budapest Festival, Sao Paulo and NHK Symphony Orchestras, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Freiburger Barockorchester and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Festival appearances have included Wiener Festwochen, Salzburg Mozartwoche and Whitsun and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. He has also conducted at La Scala, Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Opéra-Bastille, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Dresden Staatsoper and the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam.

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO), which also performs as the Cincinnati Pops, is one of America’s finest and most versatile ensembles. With a rich tradition dating back over 120 years, the internationally acclaimed CSO attracts the best musicians, artists and conductors from around the world to Cincinnati. With new commissions and groundbreaking initiatives like LUMENOCITY®, One City, One Symphony, “The Pelléas Trilogy” and the MusicNOW Festival collaboration, the orchestra is committed to being a place of experimentation.

A champion of new music, CSO has given American premieres of works by such composers as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gustav Mahler and Béla Bartók and has commissioned works that have since become mainstays of the classical repertoire, including Aaron Copland's “Fanfare for the Common Man.” CSO was the first orchestra to be broadcast to a national radio audience (1921) and the third to record (1917).

The orchestra continues to commission new works and to program an impressive array of music. In recent years, the CSO has performed world premieres by Nico Muhly, David Lang, Caroline Shaw and Daniel Bjarnason as part of the groundbreaking collaboration with the MusicNOW Festival, as well world premieres from André Previn, Gunther Schuller, Michael Fiday, T. J. Cole, Jonathan Bailey Holland and Kristin Kuster. The orchestra’s most recent commercial recording, “Concertos for Orchestra,” also features commissioned works by Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich and Zhou Tian.

CSO was the first American orchestra to complete a world tour sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and continues to tour domestically and internationally, most recently to Asia in March and a celebrated three-week European tour in August and September that included debuts at the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival and the Quincena Musical de San Sebastián. CSO has performed at New York's Carnegie Hall 48 times since its debut there in 1917, most recently to rave reviews in May 2014. In January 2016, the orchestra performed at Lincoln Center as part of the invitational Great Performers series.

The CSO is committed to enhancing and expanding music education for the children of Greater Cincinnati and works to bring music education to as broad a public as possible. Education and outreach programs currently serve more than 80,000 individuals annually.

Founded in 1918, the UK Symphony Orchestra is a 100-member all-student orchestra presenting more than 50 concerts each year, including classical, chamber and education concerts. The group is made up of undergraduate and graduate students from across the United States, Asia, South America and Europe. The orchestra has regularly performed with world-renowned concert artists including Itzhak Perlman, Lang Lang, Sarah Chang, Gil Shaham, Lynn Harrell, Marvin Hamlisch, Denyce Graves, Christine Brewer, Pink Martini, Ronan Tynan, Mark O’Connor, Wynonna Judd, Keith Lockhart and Arlo Guthrie.

In addition to its performances at Singletary Center, the orchestra has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., toured the state of Kentucky regularly, and toured China, playing concerts in major concert halls in Shanghai, Tianjin, Hangzhou, Yangzhou and Beijing. The orchestra’s performance at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was broadcast on China Central Television to more than 1.5 billion viewers. In fall of 2010, the orchestra played the opening ceremonies of the 2010 World Equestrian Games, a live performance that featured more than 1,500 performers and 200 horses that was seen live on NBC in the United States by 39 million people and by an estimated 500 million more television viewers worldwide.

John Nardolillo has appeared with more than 30 of the country’s leading orchestras, including the Boston Pops, the National Symphony, and principal orchestras of Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, Utah, Columbus, Indianapolis, Oregon, Fort Worth, Buffalo, Alabama, Louisville, Missouri, North Carolina, Toledo, Vermont, Columbus, Omaha and Hawaii. He also recently conducted concerts at the Kennedy Center, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and Carnegie Hall.

Nardolillo made his professional conducting debut in 1994 at the Sully Festival in France and has since made conducting appearances in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and China. He has led major American orchestras in subscription series concerts, summer and pops concerts, education concerts and tours, and for television and radio broadcasts. In 2004, Nardolillo joined the faculty at the UK School of Music, where he is currently serving as the director of Orchestras.

Doors for the UK Symphony Orchestra concert open at 7 p.m. with music beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available through the Singletary Center ticket office online at www.scfatickets.com, by phone at 859-257-4929, or in person at the venue. Children 6 and older are welcome.

UK Symphony Orchestra is part of the School of Music at the UK College of Fine Arts. The school, also celebrating its 100th anniversary, has garnered a national reputation for high-caliber education in opera, choral and instrumental music performance, as well as music education, music therapy, composition, and theory and music history.