Domingo Hindoyan
Domingo Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother. He started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan musical education programme El Sistema. He studied conducting at Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis. He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013, and in 2019, he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as the Orchestra’s new Chief Conductor in 2020, taking up his position in September 2021. He has now extended his contract with the Orchestra to 2028.
Frank Dupree
Award-winning Frank Dupree is one of the most versatile pianists and conductors of the new generation. Known for his infectious energy and unbridled enthusiasm, Dupree captivates audiences not only as a soloist but also as a play/direct artist, conductor, and the leader of his own jazz ensemble, the Frank Dupree Trio. Dupree’s recordings of Nikolai Kapustin’s piano concertos have attracted much international attention, and his interpretations of Piano Concertos No.4 & No.5 have earned him both the International Classical Music Award and the Diapason d’Or. Along with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, his 2025/26 season includes debuts with BBC Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra as well as return visits to the Philharmonia Orchestra, NDR Radio-philharmonie, Dortmunder Philharmoniker and Bodenseephilharmonie Konstanz among others. Recent engagements have led the German pianist to work with renowned conductors such as Sir Antonio Pappano, Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Patrick Hahn, and orchestras such as London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Gothenburg, Trondheim and Malmö symphony orchestras, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and Sinfónica Nacional de México. He has performed at many music festivals as well as renowned concert halls including the New York Lincoln Center, Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Konzerthaus Berlin, Philharmonie Essen and Dortmund, and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. Dupree is a passionate chamber musician who effortlessly crosses genre boundaries, and the same can be said for the Frank Dupree Trio: together with Jakob Krupp (double bass) and Obi Jenne (drums), Dupree explores the fascinating intersection between jazz and classical music. Born in 1991 in the Upper Rhine town of Rastatt, Dupree began taking piano and percussion lessons at an early age. He later studied piano under Professor Sontraud Speidel and conducting with Professors Péter Eötvös and Hans Zender at the University of Music Karlsruhe. In 2012, he was awarded first prize at the International Hans von Bülow Competition in Meiningen for his dual-role performance as pianist and conductor interpreting Beethoven. In 2014, Dupree was the sole prizewinner at Deutscher Musikwettbewerb and received scholarships from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Dupree is a Steinway Artist.
Adolphus Hailstork
American composer and teacher Adolphus Hailstork was born in Rochester, New York, in 1941 and started playing piano as a child. He went on to study at Howard University and Manhattan School of Music, and in 1963 spent a year at the American Institute at Fontainbleau, where his tutors included the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Hailstork spent three years serving with the US armed forces in Germany and later pursued a doctorate at Michigan State University. He himself has been Eminent Scholar and Professor of Music at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, for quarter-of-a-century. His compositions cover a range of genres, from orchestral and chamber works to choral, works song cycles and operatic scenes. They have been championed by leading conductors like Daniel Barenboim and Kurt Masur and performed by major orchestras in the United States and further afield. Among early compositions are Celebration (1977) and the award-winning Out of the Depths (1977) and American Guernica (1983) – written in remembrance of the racially-motivated 1963 firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1985, the Virginia Symphony premiered his bustling concert overture An American Port of Call, while he also includes three symphonies and three operas among his prolific output. Listen to Adolphus Hailstork talking about An American Port of Call ahead of a performance in Nashville in 2019.
George Gershwin
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in September 1898 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. The family’s original surname was Gershovitz. As a boy, the future composer and pianist wasn’t particularly interested in music, spending most of his time playing – and occasionally fighting – in the streets of the neighbourhood. When the bug bit, however, it bit hard: in 1910 he commandeered a second-hand piano bought ostensibly for his elder brother Ira, and from there he didn’t look back. Starting his career on Tin Pan Alley as a so-called ‘song plugger’, he got his big breakthrough as a composer in his own right when Al Jolson performed his song Swanee in the 1919 musical Sinbad. Although Swanee’s lyrics were by Irving Caesar, Gershwin’s main collaborator during his career was brother Ira, and together they wrote some of the brightest and best musicals and stage shows of the 1920s and 30s, packed with some of the most melodic and memorable tunes in the Great American Songbook – numbers like I Got Rhythm, Lady Be Good, Shall We Dance, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, The Man I Love and But Not For Me. In 1935, the pair teamed up with author DeBose Hayward to create the opera Porgy and Bess, the story of the crippled street beggar Porgy who comes to the rescue of Bess when she is abandoned by her violent lover. It became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But away from the stage, George Gershwin also composed for the concert hall. In 1924 he produced Rhapsody in Blue, which he himself premiered alongside Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and he followed it a year later with his Piano Concerto in F, composed in conventional three movement form. Then in 1928 his jazz-infused symphonic poem An American in Paris, inspired by his time in the City of Light, was premiered at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Who knows what else he may have gone on to write? Sadly, we will never find out because on July 9, 1937, Gershwin, who had been complaining of a burning smell in his nostrils and blinding headaches for some time, collapsed and fell into a coma. Neurosurgeons discovered a large brain tumour, but the diagnosis, and an emergency operation, came too late, and on July 11 the composer died. He was just 38. Did you know? In 1926, a young Fred and Adele Astaire performed in George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady Be Good at the Liverpool Empire. Watch Frank Dupree perform George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F.
Aaron Copland
One of the most important American musical voices of the 20th Century, Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants who ran a neighbourhood department store. He started making up tunes on the piano as a child, and at 14 started taking lessons from his first professional piano teacher. As a young composer he was influenced by Stravinsky and studied with the hugely influential Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Copland’s early works were written in a modernist style and included jazz elements (notably his 1926 Piano Concerto), although his music would develop in a more populist direction. Perhaps his most productive time came in the 1940s, during which he produced a catalogue of enduring and popular works including Fanfare for the Common Man, ballets Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, his Symphony No.3, Clarinet Concerto, and scores for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s romance drama Our Town and The Heiress, which garnered him an Oscar. Copland’s music was championed by Leonard Bernstein, and the two enjoyed a close 50-year friendship. From the 1950s onwards, Copland increasingly turned to conducting, both his own works and those of other American composers. He toured internationally, lectured about American music, and taught at institutions like Tanglewood and Harvard. During his final years he suffered from dementia, finally retreating from public performance in his early 80s. The man The New York Times praised as “a gentle yet impassioned champion of American music” died in December 1990, at the age of 90.
About the Music
Adolphus Hailstork (b.1941): An American Port of Call Composed: 1984 First Performed: 1985, Norfolk, Virginia, Virginia Symphony Orchestra cond. Richard Williams
African-American composer Adolphus Hailstork was born in Albany, New York, but for most of his life he has lived and worked in the American port of Norfolk. His most frequently played and recorded piece, An American Port of Call, is his tribute to his adopted home town. In Hailstork’s own words, it captures ‘the strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious) energy of a busy American port city’. One or two critics have compared it to Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town Overture, but Hailstork’s use of the syncopated rhythms, blue melodic inflections and solo riffs of jazz feels different – less brash, more affectionate, and in those telling inward moments, more poetic. In the end though it’s full of joyous energy. No wonder it’s proved such a hit.
George Gershwin (1898-1937): Piano Concerto in F 1. Allegro 2. Adagio – Andante con moto 3. Allegro agitato Composed: 1925 First Performed: 3 December 1925, New York, Carnegie Hall, New York Symphony Orchestra, Gershwin (piano), cond. Walter Damrosch
‘Various composers have been walking around jazz like a cat around a plate of soup, waiting for it to cool off so that they could enjoy it without burning their tongues’, wrote the American conductor Walter Damrosch. So, it was probably with a mixture of hope and apprehension that he attended a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall entitled ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’. In it, the jazz bandleader and composer Paul Whiteman offered music fusing classical and jazz styles – hardly controversial today, but in 1924 it was dynamite. Damrosch was many who were thrilled by the evening’s uncontested highlight, a ‘jazz concerto’ (or so it was billed) by George Gershwin called Rhapsody in Blue. Damrosch was so excited that he immediately aske Gershwin for a full-fledged piano concerto. Gershwin was up to his neck in contractual agreements for no less than three different Broadway musicals, but he could work fast. He started work on the new concerto in July 1925 and finished it by November. Originally Gershwin thought of calling it ‘New York Concerto’, but he decided ultimately in favour of a good old-fashioned classical abstraction, ‘Concerto in F’ – if he felt that the New York connection was self-evident, audiences ever since have agreed. The first movement is dominated by Charleston dance rhythms – for Gershwin they were ‘quick and pulsating, representing the young enthusiastic spirit of American life.’ The pensive slow movement evokes the ‘poetic nocturnal atmosphere that has come to be referred to as the American blues. In Gershwin’s words the finale is ‘an orgy of rhythms’, though near the end there’s a return of the gorgeous ‘grandioso’ passage from the first movement, now more sultry than ever. It’s the kind of music that throws vivid cinematic images straight onto the projector screen of the mind.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Symphony No.3 11. Molto moderato – with simple expression 2. Allegro molto 3. Andantino quasi allegretto - 4. Molto deliberato (freely, at first) Composed: 1944-6 First Performed: 18 October 1946, Boston, Symphony Hall, Boston Symphony Orchestra, cond. Serge Koussevitzky
When Aaron Copland began his Third Symphony, the conflict of the Second World War had already begun to turn in favour of the three ‘allied powers’, the USA, Britain and the USSR. By the time he finished it, the allies were victorious, and a in packed Times Square, New Yorkers like Copland had witnessed the spectacular ‘Ticker Tape’ celebrations following the proclamation of V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. It wasn’t just the mood of the time – growing optimism climaxing in wild exultation – that left its mark on the Third Symphony. The whole conception, uniting the American folk styles of Copland’s ballets Rodeo and Appalachian Spring with European symphonic forms and thinking, shows that this music is at a celebration of victorious humanism in both the New and Old Worlds. In defiance of the Nazi’s fascist populism, Copland selects as both the high point and the musical goal of his Third Symphony the ‘democratic’ idealism of his famous Fanfare for the Common Man, which he’d composed in 1942. Copland doesn’t simply insert the Fanfare at key moments in the score; he has it emerge ingeniously from musical processes set in motion at the very start. The example of Jean Sibelius, for many the embodiment of ‘organic’ symphonic thinking, was at the back of Copland’s mind from its first conception. The first movement’s calm, almost hymn-like opening melody already foreshadows the outlines of the Fanfare’s theme, and these outlines become less shadowy, more definite, as the movement rises to its grand central climax. Similar pre-echoes can be heard in the wild cowboy folkdance of the second movement, and in the slow movement’s evocations of both the great American plains and, in the faster central section, Latin American dance music. Then, after the Fanfare gradually emerges centre stage at the beginning of the finale, we hear the syncopated energy and improvisatory brilliance of Black American jazz music, before the Fanfare returns to crown it all. There’s a message here: Copland’s idea of the ‘Common Man’ is truly inclusive. It was an attitude that would get him into trouble very soon, as the USA became increasingly paranoid during the so-called ‘Red Scare’. 1946 though, Copland’s music captured the spirit of his country and times to perfection.