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Back to Press Release List > 07/26/2007 - Philip Seymour Hoffman/Philip Roth/Takacs Quartet: Oct 23 Performance

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CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN WITH THE TAKÁCS QUARTET ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

Pulitzer Prize-winning Novelist Philip Roth’s Everyman Inspires Inventive
Zankel Hall Program Featuring Works by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and Franz Schubert
Carnegie Hall today announced that Philip Seymour Hoffman will join the Takács Quartet for an inventive evening of words and music in Zankel Hall on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. This one-night-only performance was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth’s meditation on death, Everyman. Mr. Hoffman will read three scenes from the novel, interspersed with works written by Mr. Roth’s musical composer contemporaries: Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass. Thematically complementing these selections on the program’s second half will be a performance of Schubert’s famed “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet in D Minor, preceded by the poem that was its inspiration, also read by Mr. Hoffman.

This special collaboration was conceived by Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács Quartet and a longtime admirer of Philip Roth’s work. Mr. Roth’s twenty-seventh book, Everyman, tells an intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. Roth’s ‘Everyman’ is a successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, who, at the end of his life, realizes he has become what he does not want to be. His fate is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is broken by observation of his contemporaries’ deterioration and stalked by his own physical woes. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, whose protagonist is “called” by death and must account for his life on earth before God.

This October 23 program is one of four to be presented by the Takács Quartet during Carnegie Hall’s 2007–2008 season. The esteemed ensemble also appears on October 13, 2007, and February 21 and April 26, 2008.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman is currently in production on Charles Kaufman’s feature film, Synecdoche, New York, having recently completed production on Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War alongside Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and The Savages with Laura Linney which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007. Mr. Hoffman’s last screen appearance was opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 3. Prior to that, he starred and executive produced the feature film Capote, for which he received the Academy Award® for Best Actor, a Golden Globe, and a SAG Award. His other film credits include Cold Mountain, The Party’s Over, Punch-Drunk Love, 25th Hour, Love Liza, Almost Famous, Scent of a Woman, and Nobody’s Fool among many others. Mr. Hoffman is a member and Co-Artistic Director of LAByrinth Theater Company (LAB). His stage credits include: Jack Goes Boating, a production of LAB staged at The Public Theater, Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Broadway, The Seagull at The New York Shakespeare Festival, True West on Broadway, Defying Gravity at the American Place Theater, The Merchant of Venice as directed by Peter Sellars, and numerous others. Mr. Hoffman is also an accomplished theater director with credits including The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, and Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train, all written by Stephen Adly Guirgis for LAB.

American novelist Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost, will be published on October 1, 2007. In 1997 he won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of the Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. Recently he received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes, the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2007 and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. Mr. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. He is a native of Newark, New Jersey and was educated at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago.

The Grammy Award-winning Takács Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s leading string quartets. The Quartet has performed throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as at such prestigious festivals as Aspen, Berlin, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, and Tanglewood. Formed at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Quartet first received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. Subsequent honors included the Gold Medal at the Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions, and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition and the Bratislava Competition. In 2001 the Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross by the Republic of Hungary. Since 1983, the Takács Quartet has served as the resident ensemble at the University of Colorado. The ensemble is also a Resident Quartet at the Aspen Music Festival, and Associate Artists of the South Bank Center in London. Known for its extensive discography, the Takács Quartet’s most recent disc of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ (D810) and ‘Rosamunde’ (D804) was released in 2006 on the Hyperion label. A disc featuring Brahms’ Piano Quintet with Stephen Hough will be released in November 2007. The Quartet garnered accolades for its recordings of the complete Beethoven String Quartet cycle, in three sets, on the Decca label. The first recording—which included the composer’s three ‘Razumovsky’ String Quartets, Op. 59, and Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 74, ‘Harp’—won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Performance in 2002. Its recordings on the Decca label include music by Bartók, Borodin, Brahms, Chausson, Dvořák, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Smetana.

Program Information
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
Zankel Hall
TAKÁCS QUARTET
Edward Dusinberre, Violin
Károly Schranz, Violin
Geraldine Walther, Viola
András Fejér, Cello

Readings by PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

ARVO PÄRT Psalom
Reading from Philip Roth’s Everyman
PHILIP GLASS String Quartet No. 2, "Company"
Reading from Everyman
ARVO PÄRT Summa
Reading from Everyman
ARVO PÄRT Fratres
Reading of Matthias Claudius's "Death and the Maiden"
FRANZ SCHUBERT String Quartet in D Minor, D.810, "Death and the Maiden"

Bank of America is the Proud Season Sponsor of Carnegie Hall.

Ticket Information
Beginning on September 17 tickets, priced at $50 and $58, will be available at the Carnegie Hall Box Office, 154 West 57th Street. Tickets may also be charged to major credit cards by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800 or online by visiting www.carnegiehall.org .


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