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“Sting: A Winter’s Night…” captures the artist in the evocative setting of one of England’s most famous cathedrals. Standing on a peninsula overlooking the River Wear in County Durham, the 1,000 year-old UNESCO world heritage building is an iconic landmark of Northern England. Inside, the architecture and atmosphere are equally as inspiring, and it is in this setting that Sting is joined by guest musicians, including local Newcastle artists Kathryn Tickell (Northumbrian pipes and fiddle), Peter Tickell (fiddle) and Julian Sutton (Melodeon). Esteemed performers from around the world also include Dominic Miller (guitar), Vincent Ségal (cello), Scottish harpist Mary MacMaster, Ira Coleman (bass), Chris Gecker (trumpet), David Mansfield (violin and mandolin), Cyro Baptista, Bashiri Johnson and Rhani Krija (percussion), and vocalists Laila Biali, Lisa Fischer, Jo Lawry and Steven Santoro. Producer Robert Sadin conducts an ensemble of 35 musicians, which includes additional string and brass sections.

Featuring traditional music of the British Isles as its starting point, Sting and guest musicians interpret stirring, folk-based melodies including “The Snow it Melts the Soonest” (traditional Newcastle ballad), “Soul Cake” (traditional English “begging” song), “Christmas at Sea” (traditional Scottish song), “Gabriel’s Message” (14th century carol), “Balulalow” (lullaby by Peter Warlock) and “Now Winter Comes Slowly” (Henry Purcell). Two of Sting’s own compositions are also featured: “Lullaby for an Anxious Child” and “The Hounds of Winter,” which originally appeared on his previous release Mercury Falling. “Winter is a season I’ve always had an affinity for,” says Sting. “It’s certainly rich in terms of inspiration and materials.”

Born a milkman’s son in Newcastle, England, Sting met Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers, who formed The Police in 1977. The band quickly became a success in both the U.S. and the UK, scoring several No. 1 hits including Roxanne, Every Breath you Take, King of Pain and Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. The Police earned five Grammy Awards and two Brits, and in 2003, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With the release of Dream of the Blue Turtles in 1985, followed by Bring on the Night, Nothing Like the Sun, The Soul Cages, Ten Summoner’s Tales, Mercury Falling, Brand New Day, All This Time, Sacred Love and Songs from the Labyrinth, Sting has evolved into one of the world’s most distinctive and highly-respected solo performers, collecting an additional 11 Grammy Awards, two Brits, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, three Oscar nominations, Billboard Magazine’s Century Award and MusiCares Person of the Year for 2004.

A production of Graying & Balding, Inc., in association with Universal Music Classical Management & Productions (UMCMP) and THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG, the production is directed by the Emmy Award-winning team Jim Gable and Ann Kim. A DVD of the program will be released November 24 on Deutsche Grammophon, featuring additional performances and behind-the-scenes footage documenting the concert’s genesis.

Great Performances is funded by the Irene Diamond Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Vivian Milstein, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public television viewers and PBS.

Photograph for video thumbnail by Tony Molina.

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The My Christmas concert is the ultimate holiday musical experience from Andrea Bocelli, showcasing the tenor in performances of traditional carols and other favorites in English, with a few additional selections in Italian and German. Regarding Christmas music, the star remarks, “I have long dreamed of recording a holiday album that captures the beautiful traditions of the holiday season. Every year, these songs have brought incredible joy to me and my family, and it is my hope to give back that same joy by making this album.” Of her experience singing Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” with Bocelli during the taping, country music star Reba McEntire told the Toronto Sun, “I sat there in awe. I just loved it. (His voice) is rich like frosting on a cake – decadent. It’s so full. I stood there right beside him and just watched him.”

An iconic figure in music who has sold more than 60 million albums to date, Bocelli continues to defy categorization, age barriers and labels of any kind. In concert or on the opera stage, he has sung with everyone from Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo to Bono and Celine Dion. In addition to his solo Great Performances concert programs, Bocelli’s many memorable television appearances include the Oscar and Grammy Awards telecasts, mentoring contestants on American Idol and performances at the Official Ceremonies of the Olympic Games, all of which have propelled Andrea Bocelli into becoming a global household name in contemporary popular music.

Great Performances is funded by the Irene Diamond Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public television viewers and PBS.

The only continuing primetime performance showcase on American television, GREAT PERFORMANCES presents a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries. With its programs garnering 64 Emmy Awards and four George Foster Peabody Awards, the series has received every major television honor.

Regardless of geographic or economic limitations, GREAT PERFORMANCES insures its audiences “the best seats in the house” with a roster of artists and performing arts companies that represent a “Who’s Who” of excellence and virtuosity in the international performing arts.

Adams’ work stands out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Because of his ability to integrate different styles, including American popular forms, his standing today has been of compared in importance to American musical expression to that of Aaron Copland in the forties and Leonard Bernstein in the fifties.

In a segment that aired on October 18, 2009 for WNET.org’s weekly arts program, SundayArts, Paula Zahn interviewed John Adams, composer of the new work City Noir performed for Dudamel’s inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Learn more about this composer’s work in the following video profile:

When Gustavo Dudamel’s in town, you go. So on Saturday night, I caught the opening concert of the Israel Philharmonic’s U.S. tour with Dudamel at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, just prior to his two Carnegie Hall concerts on November 16 and 17.

I asked my 14-year-old daughter to come along, and I didn’t even have to twist her arm. Here’s the rare A-league conductor who’s not even twice her age, and he jumps around on the podium pretty much like kids her age. On a more serious level, my daughter also gets that Dudamel is considered in the same league artistically as Leonard Bernstein, and that this makes his concerts potentially historic. She has friends who are envious she got to go, friends who know that this “Dude” isn’t the same as the “Later, dude” dude.

The concert itself—Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and two works by Bernstein, his Halil for solo flute, string orchestra, and percussion, and his Jubilee Games, written for the 50th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic, in 1986—was … how do I put this? It felt like a love-fest between the Israel Phil and Dudamel. The program was so intimately connected with the orchestra and its history that it was impossible not to be moved at many points during the evening. Plus, Leonard Bernstein not only was the composer of two pieces of music on the program, he led the IPO as early as 1948, in Beersheba, Israel, and conducted it frequently thereafter, eventually being named laureate conductor in 1988. Jubilee Games itself is a classically Bernsteinian messy hodgepodge; it’s got some parts where musicians can improvise, such as free-form strings sawing away and trombones raucously glissandoing, a little Habanera, a little Shostakovich, ending with a recorded voice singing the Benediction in Hebrew. The orchestra threw itself into the performance and made as good a case as probably can be made for the music.

Dudamel conducted the Tchaikovsky from memory. The brass played with a wild intensity during the first and fourth movements, the strings wonderfully evoked balalaikas in the pizzicato movement, the oboe and bassoon traded the second-movement’s mournful melody back and forth with skill. And of course, it was entertaining to watch Dudamel’s dancelike podium maneuvers, especially when  he gave fist-pump cues on Tchaikovsky’s heavy, Russian offbeats. The orchestra members seemed to bask in the occasion of playing for Dudamel, at first refusing to stand or take bows themselves.

The IPO tour takes place on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary. And as these things happen sometimes, the moment that felt most special wasn’t anything on the written program. It was the opening, with the American flag lit at the left of the proscenium, and the Israeli flag on the right. The orchestra stood up and played first the “Star Spangled Banner” and then “HaTikvah.” Everyone in the auditorium, 2,750 of us, stood up and sang—quite beautifully, actually—and we got all choked up.

Pity the Rodolfo and Mimì pouring out their hearts this July in La Scala’s La Bohème. It’s possible that more people will be craning their necks to see 27-year-old Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel in the pit, than either the Mimì (Italian soprano Carmela Remigio) or Rodolfo (American tenor James Valenti, who sang a televised Pinkerton this season at New York City Opera). Neither Valenti nor Remigio is a big name like Angela Gheorghiu, the Met’s Mimì this season, or Jonas Kaufmann, who sang Rodolfo in a Bohème conducted by Dudamel in February. But at least Remigio has lived through Dudamania before: she sang Donna Anna in a 2006 Don Giovanni he led in Milan.

Yes, Dudamania is in full swing. In Los Angeles, where Dudamel begins as the L.A. Philharmonic’s new music director in 2009-10, the orchestra welcomed its curly-haired superstar this spring with a lunch catered by none other than Pink’s hot dog stand, creating for the occasion a special “Dude dog”—guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapenos, tortilla chips. (Dudamel is said to be fond of hot dogs.) Normally, classical musicians are barely on the radar screens of the bigger media outlets, but he’s such a hot commodity that he recently had to turn down numerous interview requests, including ones from Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno. His fiery performances of Shostakovich, Mahler, and Beethoven with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela have gotten people excited the way they used to get over Bernstein. The Venezuelan orchestra has become symbol of the against-all-odds success of that country’s government-run music-education program, and Dudamel is its hero.

Of course, opera and symphonic performances are two different beasts, and the lyricism and sweetness of Puccini’s La Bohème are in pretty strong contrast to, say, Beethoven’s obsessional motivic pursuits or Mahler’s extremes of emotion. But it’s hard not to cheer for Dudamel, whose young Venezuelan musicians regularly whoop it up in an encore from Ginastera’s Estancia ballet that involves instrument-twirling, dancing, and a ferocity and joyful abandon you rarely see from a large orchestra. I’ve been enjoying listening to the Fiesta, a new Dudamel/SBYOV CD of an all-Latin American program that includes the Ginastera, as well as Revueltas’s Sensemaya and the rollicking Mambo from Bernstein’s West Side Story that also has had audiences on their feet cheering the way they do after a goal at a soccer game.

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The Los Angeles Philharmonic is widely regarded as one of the most contemporary and innovative orchestras in America. Dudamel made his U.S. conducting debut with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2005. In April 2007, during a guest conducting engagement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dudamel was named the LA Phil’s next Music Director as of the 2009-2010 season, succeeding Esa-Pekka Salonen. “For me, this is really so exciting to be starting my first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” says Dudamel. “First, this is a beautiful challenge and second, it’s a wonderful opportunity to make great music with my new LA Phil family. The most important thing is to enjoy our time together.”

On the program for his inaugural concert are Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major (“Titan”) and the world premiere of that latest work by Pulitzer Prize-winning music composer John Adams, City Noir. “As the title suggests, ‘City Noir’ is a symphony inspired by the peculiar ambience and mood of Los Angeles ‘noir’ films, especially those produced in the late forties and early fifties,” reveals Adams, newly appointed LA Phil Creative Chair. “My music is an homage not necessarily to the film music of that period but rather to the overall aesthetic of the era.”

Gustavo Dudamel is the product of the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, or more popularly known as El Sistema (the System), created in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan conductor, petroleum economics professor and former congressional deputy. Targeting mostly children living in slums, the System gives a musical instrument and instruction to many underprivileged and at-risk Venezuelan youth as an alternative to gang life and crime. “Music changed my life,” Dudamel told the British Herald newspaper. “I can look back now and see that many of the boys from my class went on to become involved in drugs and crime. Those who played music did not.”

Before he even begins his directorship at the LA Phil, Dudamel has been instrumental in creating the American version of El Sistema, YOLA or Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. The program, modeled after the Venezuelan prototype, began in 2007 with youth between the ages of seven and 16 from a disadvantaged district in south central Los Angeles, but its ultimate goal is to provide a musical instrument and a place in a youth orchestra for every Los Angeles county young person who wants one.

News of Gustavo Dudamel’s talent first spread worldwide after his triumph at the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in May 2004. Just three years later, Dudamel was awarded the Premio de la Latindad, an honor given for outstanding contributions to Latin cultural life. In 2008, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra was granted Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, given annually by the Prince of Asturias Foundation in Spain. Dudamel was awarded the 2007 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Young Artists and, most recently, along with his mentor Dr. Abreu, the 2008 “Q Prize” from Harvard University for extraordinary service to children.

The national PBS telecast of Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic: The Inaugural Concert is being produced by Bernhard Fleischer Moving Images, THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG, ZDF-ARTE, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Directed for television by Brian Large, the concert will be telecast in South America and Asia as well.

Great Performances is funded by the Irene Diamond Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Vivian Milstein, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public television viewers and PBS. Major funding is also provided by The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Arts Fund, with additional funding from the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust.

Photo by Robert Corwin