Tag Archive: Program Notes

  1. Program Notes — PINES OF ROME

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer
    Paul Novak. Credit: Oriani Camara

    Composing a California Symphony Commission

    Scott Foglesong Interviews Composer-in-Residence Paul Novak

    In July 2026 I had the pleasure of speaking with our new composer-in-residence Paul Novak about his thoughts for his first California Symphony commission—well before he had begun composing the work.

    “I’m planning a piece for orchestra with recorded samples of voices. I will interview artists, people from the community, family members, and ask them all the same question: what’s your favorite part of your body? Then I’ll weave their responses into this piece, splitting the samples up so I’ll have just the names of the various body parts.”

    About the balance between those samples and the orchestra: “I would like it for to really be a conversation between the two, a balance between more intimate moments and passages where you can feel the full power of 70 people making music together.”

    About any overall philosophical guidelines: “I’m interested in the affective power of music and its ability to inspire emotions, using many different sonic palettes. I’ve written a lot about the natural world, and I have also been inspired by psychoanalysis and psychology. And I’m also interested in how we respond to sound in our bodies.”

    For Parts of the Body—that’s the tentative title—Novak tells us that he hopes “to write a piece that is a novel experience for the audience, but novel in a way that is inclusive and that brings them in.”

    A lot can happen between July 2026 and May 2027, and Novak could wind up writing something entirely different. “It’s all about whether it has a magic to it,” says Novak. “Hopefully I can write something that has that kind of magic for the audience.”

    Generalife Gardens in Granada, Spain. Credit: Michal Osmenda

    Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)

    Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1915)

    Although Manuel de Falla spent part of his formative years in France, where he was influenced by Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas, he never allowed French idioms to dominate his style. From first to last he protected his Spanish heritage, even after having exiled himself to Argentina in 1939 after Francisco Franco’s fascist coup.

    Nights in the Gardens of Spain started out as a set of three nocturnes for solo piano, but 1915 de Falla re-fashioned the suite for piano and orchestra. De Falla’s described it as “symphonic impressions,” which suggests more three-movement tone poem and less concerto.

    Each of the Nights portrays one of Spain’s most cherished formal gardens. “At the Generalife” takes us first to the magnificent Moorish Alhambra Palace in Granada, in a portrait that, despite occasional moments of crisp rhythm, generally retains a hushed and atmospheric demeanor. The second-place “Distant Dance” celebrates the flamenco song known as a malagueña, filled with the sound of strumming guitars. To conclude, “In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba” makes skilled use of the copla, an Andalusian poetic form that resembles a musical rondo, in which a cyclic refrain alternates with contrasting passages.

    Monument to Manuel Ponce in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Credit: Luisalvaz

    Manuel Ponce (1882–1948)

    Chapultepec, Tres Bocetos sinfónicas (1934)

    He can rightfully claim the status of forefather and patron saint of modern Mexican concert music, yet Manuel María Ponce Cuéllar is still mostly known for his lovely song “Estrellita.” The rest of his extensive output—for piano, guitar, chamber ensembles, and orchestra—barely registers a blip on the international repertory radar.

    That’s too bad, because there’s a lot of terrific stuff just waiting to be discovered. Consider Ponce’s 1934 “Chapultepec, Tres Bocetos sinfónicas,” a triptych of tone poems invoking the vast forested park of the same name in Mexico City. The opening Primavera (Spring) fills the concert hall with magic, as shimmering, dancing figures bring a vital and dense landscape to life in a gradual sustained crescendo.

    In second place comes a Nocturno that seems to be more about people than nighttime: think of moonlit gardens where a lovesick swain serenades his lady love perched high above on a castle balcony. The song-and-dance (Canto y Danza)finale starts out a bit somber, with a mournful solo oboe. But a bubbly rhythm begins to form in the background and, before you know it, the entire orchestra throws itself into a joyous celebration of dance and movement.

    Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936)

    Pines of Rome, P. 141 (1923-1924)

    Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. That was never more apropos than with Respighi’s youthful tone poem Fountains of Rome, which failed to impress at its 1917 premiere. That proved to be only a temporary setback; when the eminent conductor Arturo Toscanini took the piece up for a 1918 performance, it became a smash hit and transformed Respighi into not only a world-famous composer but also quite a wealthy one as well.

    He never looked back. Two more Roman tone poems followed, Pines of Rome in 1924 – which has become even better known than Fountains – and Roman Festivals in 1928, together with a cornucopia of operas, chamber music, lieder, and above all, orchestral music.

    Four stands of pines, four times of day: thus the splendidly evocative world of Pines of Rome, Respighi’s most popular composition and one of the great orchestral showpieces in all literature, given its American premiere by no less than Arturo Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic.

    Ottorino Respighi

    Respighi himself gave us a handy guide to his intentions regarding Pines: “While in his preceding work, Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of Nature, in Pines of Rome he uses Nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and vision. The centuries-old trees which so characteristically dominate the Roman landscape become witnesses to the principal events in Roman life.”

    Pines calls for a gigantic orchestra augmented by extra brass and organ for the finale, plus a recording of a nightingale for the third-place nocturne. It is said—but not confirmed—that Respighi himself made that particular recording, to this day included by the publisher with the score.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 26-27 Season concludes with PINES OF ROME on Saturday, May 1 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, May 2 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  2. Program Notes — BEETHOVEN’S SECOND

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer
    The C major scale in Jesse Aikin’s seven-shape shape note system

    Henry Cowell (1897–1965)

    Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10 (1955)

    In his eighteen Hymn and Fuguing Tunes the 20th century iconoclast Henry Cowell reached back to one of the earliest bonafide American composers, William Billings. Born in 1746, he was apparently an ungainly chap who paid scant attention to his personal grooming and who died in extreme poverty at the age of 53.

    Early America placed a high premium on music education. To that end, educators and composers developed shape-note notation, a system by which the steps of the scale are indicated by differently-shaped notes. It’s like a visual version of moveable-do solfège, which assigns various syllabus to the steps of the scale as an aid to learning melodies. A collection of shape-note hymns called Southern Harmony inspired Cowell’s modern gloss in which he channels Billings’ sturdy style while providing his own newly-composed tunes.

    Cowell tells us that No. 10, for oboe and strings, was inspired by “Southern Revival meetings in which popular minstrel show rhythms were turned to religious purposes.” The reserved initial melody with its lovely harmonization eventually gives way to the ‘fuguing’ treatment in which melodic lines imitate each other, the whole radiating gentle cheer and optimism.

    John Adams

    John Adams (b. 1947)

    Violin Concerto (1993)

    John Adams has been happily exploring the broad spectrum of music throughout his career. Originally trained as a clarinetist, he played in marching bands and orchestras alike, conducted Harvard’s student-run Bach Society Orchestra, absorbed rock music à la Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, and studied composition. His all-embracing musical ethos was on full display during his tenure in the 1970s at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I was his student in several classes and ensembles.

    Another memorable presence on the SF Conservatory faculty in those days was a new violinist in the San Francisco Symphony, Jorja Fleezanis, who eventually went on to the Minnesota Orchestra as their first female concertmaster. It was Jorja’s tireless energy that powered a triple commission from the Minnesota Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and the New York City Ballet for John Adams’s Violin Concerto, which has become an integral repertory item ever since Jorja played the premiere in 1994.

    The Adams concerto both honors and departs from traditions amassed over several centuries of violin concertos. For example, the solo part is often extremely high in the violin’s register à la Beethoven—a strategy that defends against the soloist being drowned out by the orchestra. But orchestra and soloist do not share materials, a situation almost unheard of in earlier concertos. Instead, they co-exist, each tending to their own bailiwicks, such as the first movement’s constant rising-tendril orchestral figurations that are complemented by a nearly nonstop “hyper-melody” (Adams’s own term) in the solo violin, which plays for an astonishing 91% of the movement’s duration.

    The second movement provides the orchestra with a cyclically repetitive melodic figure, a time-honored practice known as either chaconne or passacaglia. (Don’t believe anybody who claims to know the precise difference between the two.) The violin floats above, thus the movement title Chaconne: Body through which the dream flows. The concluding Toccare (i.e., ‘touch’ piece in Baroque terminology, typically for virtuoso keyboard) is an unrestrained jamboree, a country fiddler let loose to go at it with maximum bravura.

    Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

    Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 (1803)

    Concert programs were a lot longer in Beethoven’s day than in our own. Consider Beethoven’s program for an elephantine affair on April 5, 1803 that included the First Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto, and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives in addition to his brand-new Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36. Apparently rehearsals were troubled and some pieces were dropped at the last minute. The concert doesn’t seem to have gone all that well. But the new symphony did receive generally favorable notices in the press, save the typical protest that the work was “too long and some passages overly artificial.”

    The overall affect of the Second Symphony is of heroism, optimism, and robust good cheer. That’s particularly impressive given Beethoven’s chaotic state of mind during the work’s gestation, a period that was amongst the most wrenching of his life. His hearing had been steadily deteriorating for some time, as tinnitus—a ringing in his ears—was blotting out all other sounds. He had tried any number of remedies and had visited any number of healers, some of them quacks, to no avail. In despair, he had taken a lease on a lodging in the nearby country town of Heiligenstadt, where in October 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers, undelivered and found amongst his papers after his death. In this so-called ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ he acknowledged his affliction and hinted at thoughts of suicide, but counterbalanced that with a steely determination to meet this calamity head on and surmount his despair.

    Statue of Ludwig van Beethoven by Max Klinger, 1902, presently housed in the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, Germany

    The Second Symphony marks a resolute break with the late-Classical gestalt of the First Symphony. Compared to the late symphonies of Haydn and Mozart it is vaster in scale and broader in scope; it is audacious and adventuresome, gutsy and fearless, personal and self-revealing. Nothing like its moonlit, confessional slow movement had been attempted before in the essentially public arena of the symphony, and surely no previous symphonic finale had ever teemed with such coiled energy and near-manic glee. Listening to the work nowadays, with the revolutionary impact of the Eroica or the psychological arc of the Fifth in our collective consciousness, it may be a bit difficult to recognize the Second for the barnburner that it was. But it was no mere predecessor to the landmarks still to come. “Of a depth, power, and artistic knowledge like very few,” wrote one contemporary critic. The Second expressed not only the restless new spirit of its age, but also the indomitable will of a composer who refused to retreat in the face of personal disaster.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 26-27 Season continues with BEETHOVEN’S SECOND on Saturday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 14 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  3. Program Notes — MOZART AND HAYDN IN PARIS

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829)

    Symphony in G Major, Op. 12 No. 2 (1769)

    When speaking of the Classical era, the phrase “French symphonist” is almost a non-sequitur. Symphonies just weren’t things that French composers wrote as a rule, being much more occupied with opera as well as church and chamber music. That’s not to say that symphonies weren’t performed in Paris—they were, and frequently. But the composers of choice were typically folks such as Joseph Haydn and his student Ignaz Pleyel. Later in the 19th century France made up for its symphonic neglect and then some. But until then, home-grown French symphonies were scarce.

    But not altogether absent. The long-lived François-Joseph Gossec—he made it to age 95—was competent and prolific in a wide range of genres, including approximately 35 symphonies. His Symphony in G Major, Op. 12 No. 2 exemplifies his bright, witty style at its best. The opening Allegro molto savors of the Mannheim court orchestra, with its busy string textures, upwards zooming melodies, and skillful use of a pair of oboes. The second-place Allegretto molto contains such well-crafted irregular-length phrases that the listener isn’t likely to catch the irregularity without a commentarial heads-up. The finale is lightweight, charming, and toe-tappy, in keeping with best practices of the 1760s. It wouldn’t be long before composers began exploring considerably more substantial last movements, but for now, the finale-as-dessert reigned supreme.

    Portrait of François-Joseph Gossec by Antoine Vestier, 1791
    The Tuileries Palace in 1869, about a decade before its demolition. The public premiere of Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 took place here in 1778.

    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

    Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K. 397 “Paris” (1778)

    Mozart was typically the author of his own misfortunes. Careless with money and lacking everyday common sense, he was woefully overconfident in his ability to either charm or borrow his way out of trouble. Neither was possible during his disastrous eighteen-month trip through Germany and France in 1777-78 in search of advancement and opportunities beyond Salzburg. A miserable sojourn in Paris, where he was reduced to pawning his valuables, marked the nadir of his career so far. Then his mother died. (She had been his chaperone this time around, father Leopold being unable to absent himself yet again from his kapellmeister duties.)

    Among the few good things that came out of the miserable trip was the “Paris” Symphony in D Major, K. 397, composed in 1778 for the Concert Spirituel, the oldest and most established concert series in Paris. Apparently the rehearsal was a disaster, but the concert went very well indeed, as Mozart described in a letter of July 3, 1778 to Leopold:

    “Right in the middle of the first Allegro was a passage that I knew they would like; the whole audience was thrilled by it and there was a tremendous burst of applause … I began [my finale] with the two violin sections only, piano for  the first eight bars—followed instantly by a forte; the audience, as I expected, said ‘Shh!’ at the soft beginning, and then, as soon as they heard the forte that followed, immediately began to clap their hands.”

    Portrait of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges by Mather Brown, 1788

    Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799)

    Symphony No. 1 in G Major, Op. 11 No. 1 (ca. 1778)

    We possess a fine 1787 portrait of Joseph Bologne in which he embodies the very image of the pre-Revolutionary French gentleman, complete with powdered wig, billowing lace kerchief, richly textured velvet coat, gloves, and elegant rapier attesting to his fencing skill.

    But there’s something just a bit different about it: Joseph Bologne was a person of color. The son of a wealthy French planter and a slave woman, he was born in the French West Indies and settled in Paris, where he happily hobnobbed with the elite in their salons, clubs, and gardens.

    His output is mostly violin music, but he also produced two symphonies in the late 1770s. These are admirable examples of the style galant—decorative and elegant, more concerned with providing a pleasing surface than delving into the deeper emotions. Symphony No. 1 in G Major begins with a well-crafted first movement in the then-emerging ‘sonata’ form, followed by a lighter-than-air dance movement. To conclude, Bologne presents a quickstep (and short) finale characterized by roly-poly rhythms and an overall uncomplicated demeanor.

    Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

    Symphony No. 85 in B-flat Major “La Reine” (1785)

    It was among the most lavish commissions of the later 18th century. In 1784 the Parisian Olympic Lodge offered Joseph Haydn a whopping 1350 gulden—more than his entire yearly salary as Esterházy kapellmeister—for six new symphonies, to be performed by their superlative orchestra led by Joseph Bologne. Thus were born the ‘Paris’ symphonies, Haydn’s most impressive achievements in the symphonic genre until his twelve ‘London’ symphonies of the 1790s.

    No. 85 bears the nickname “La Reine” in honor of Marie Antoinette, who claimed it as her favorite symphony. While it stands among Haydn’s most ingratiating and lyrical late works, it makes abundantly clear that, by and large, the style galant just wasn’t his cup of tea. He was too vital for that, too virile; his megawatt-level talent and staggering craftsmanship guaranteed that he would never produce anything that was merely decorative. The La Reine’s brilliant first movement combines surprising twists and turns with a tongue-in-cheek self-quote from his 1772 “Farewell” symphony.

    Sketch of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, ca. 1780-81

    The second-place Romance sports one of those friendly, toe-tappy tunes that Haydn could conjure up with such seeming nonchalance and develop with such breathtaking inventiveness. (Contrary to what you might read elsewhere, it is not a French folk song.) Even the raised-pinky Minuetto e Trio, quite the departure from Haydn’s typically big-boned peasant-dance minuets, spices up its courtly punctilio with off-kilter accents and quirky rhythms.

    Haydn was a prime mover in elevating the formerly featherweight finales of the Classical era into more complex and thereby more rewarding conclusions. In this rondo-form Presto we have him at his athletic and greyhound-lean best, as he adroitly avoids the tedium that can arise from all those repetitions of a rondo’s main tune.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 26-27 Season continues with MOZART AND HAYDN IN PARIS on Saturday, February 6 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, February 7 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  4. Program Notes — FROM TCHAIKOVSKY TO COPLAND

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    Anton Arensky (1861–1906)

    Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a (1894)

    It was once a convenient music-appreciation bromide that Imperial Russia’s leading musical centers, St. Petersburg and Moscow, were polar opposites. It was said that the Petersburg folks (Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, et al.) were nationalists who promoted a resolutely nativist Russian music, whereas the Muscovites (Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky) were cosmopolites who gladly absorbed European influences.

    It was all so neat, so tidy. And so misleading. In practice things were a lot fuzzier. Consider Anton Arensky, who was trained in St. Petersburg under Rimsky-Korsakov. Upon his 1882 graduation he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and an ardent Tchaikovsky follower. In 1895 he returned to St. Petersburg, where he died eleven years later. Despite being a thoroughly eclectic composer who had spent the bulk of his life in St. Petersburg, he was routinely grouped with the Moscow contingent. That Tchaikovsky connection said it all.

    Anton Arensky, 1905

    Arensky’s Tchaikovskian bona fides were never more on display than with the slow movement of his 1894 String Quartet No. 2 Op. 35, which pays homage to the recently-deceased master via a set of variations on Tchaikovsky’s song “Legend” from the Children’s Songs, Op. 54. The variations were so well-received that Arensky arranged them for string orchestra, in which guise they have achieved full repertory status. That’s with good reason: they are masterfully constructed, immaculately orchestrated, and superbly well-paced.

    Benny Goodman, 1959. Credit: Hans Gerber

    Aaron Copland (1900–1990)

    Clarinet Concerto (1948)

    Aaron Copland’s musical style is so often associated with the great American outdoors that it’s easy to forget that he was no kind of a country boy, nor is the bulk of his music even remotely folksy. Raised in New York City by his Eastern European immigrant parents, he decamped to France for his musical education. It was there that he acquired his elegantly lean idiom, far more indebted to Stravinsky than to any American influences. Once he returned to the United States he became an indefatigable champion of American music (including Latin America) in all its kaleidoscopic variety.

    The famed swing clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman commissioned the Clarinet Concerto from Copland and played the premiere in a 1950 radio broadcast with Fritz Reiner conducting the NBC Symphony. Although writing for such a soloist would seem to mandate a strongly jazz-flavored work, Copland kept the jazz elements subtle. The Clarinet Concerto is no crass showpiece tossed off for the titillation of Goodman’s fan base; Copland’s orchestration is deliberately sparse—just strings, clarinet, and harp—and the mood is more regretful than populist. The concerto’s heart center is the first movement, a sustained aria filled with longing, surely one of Copland’s most intimate and revealing creations. (Its evocative placement in Ken Burns’ documentary series The War may provide some listeners with a jolt of recognition.) The lively second movement—which follows nonstop after an extended solo cadenza—is a rich stew that incorporates not only jazz idioms but also a Brazilian popular tune into its pungent mix.

    Arturo Toscanini conducting in the film Hymn of the Nations, 1944

    Samuel Barber (1910–1981)

    Adagio for Strings (1938)

    Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini wielded immense influence over American musical taste via weekly NBC Symphony broadcasts that attracted audiences numbering in the millions from the late 1930s onwards. His programming reflected his rock-solid artistic integrity. It was broad. It was substantial. And it was by and large European. Unlike his contemporary Serge Koussevitzky, Toscanini rarely played American music, much less encouraged the creation of new works.

    But it was Toscanini who exhorted the young Samuel Barber to orchestrate the slow movement of his 1936 String Quartet Op. 11. His championship helped to establish an American talisman that has evolved far beyond its native venue in the concert hall. Barber’s Adagio underpinned the announcement of FDR’s death; it accompanied Albert Einstein’s funeral; it made an indelible impression in Oliver Stone’s film Platoon and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man; it has been adapted and arranged by any number of adapters and arrangers, including Barber himself via the 1967 Agnus Dei for chorus.

    Samuel Barber may have been only in his twenties when he wrote the work, but the Adagio is the product of a mature master and a beloved American masterpiece that has moved, inspired, and comforted listeners for more than 80 years.

    Statue of Tchaikovsky in Simferopol, Crimea. Credit: Boris Mavlyutov

    Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)

    Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48 (1880)

    “The first movement is my homage to Mozart,” Tchaikovsky wrote. “It is intended to be an imitation of his style, and I should be delighted if I thought I had in any way approached my model.” As the exquisite Serenade for Strings began its triumphant progression through the world’s concert halls, he even went so far as to claim that the work was “not without artistic qualities.” Coming from this pickiest and most self-critical of composers, that’s high praise indeed.

    The Mozart connection is clear in the title. Serenades, ever-popular in Habsburg realms, provided tony nabobs with loosely-structured entertainments in multiple movements. Mozart’s catalog includes thirteen numbered serenades, together with added divertimenti and cassations, including such perennial favorites as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the “Posthorn” and “Haffner” serenades, and that festival for winds, the Gran Partita.

    Tchaikovsky’s Serenade stands tall even in such elevated company. Its four movements are superbly structured and magnificently orchestrated, from the opening Piece in the form of a sonatina, through that oh-so-popular waltz in second place, then a meditative Élégie that floats along in a pastel dreamscape. The frisky finale is the Serenade’s only Russian-hued movement, with its Russian folk tunes—“On the Green Meadow” to open, followed by “Under the Green Apple Tree.” To wrap things up, Tchaikovsky refers back to the serenade’s introduction, followed by a breathless galop to the finish line. (Nota bene: Bostonians got a chance to hear Tchaikovsky himself conduct the Serenade in 1891, during his American tour.)

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 26-27 Season continues with FROM TCHAIKOVSKY TO COPLAND on Saturday, November 7 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 8 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  5. Program Notes — SIBELIUS, HIGDON, AND BARTÓK

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)

    The Oceanides, Op. 73 (1914)

    Sibelius was at his creative peak in 1913 when a commission arrived from Yale composer Horatio Parker on behalf of Carl Stoeckel, a wealthy American arts patron. Sibelius started work in the winter of 1914 and mailed the new piece to Parker in March. But he had reservations about that initial version, so he performed extensive surgery on it during the Atlantic crossing for his first, and as it turned out only, visit to the United States.

    Sibelius loved America. Niagara Falls blew his socks off. Ever the bon vivant, he reveled in the gustatory and bibulous joys of New York’s legendary Delmonico’s restaurant. And he was thrilled by the crackerjack orchestra assembled for Stoeckel’s music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut on June 4, 1914, as he well might have been—it was staffed with musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Metropolitan Opera orchestra.

    His new work was The Oceanides, described by critic and Sibelius champion Olin Downes as “the finest evocation of the sea that has ever been produced in music.” Unlike most Sibelius tone poems, Oceanides isn’t based on Finnish folklore; instead, it is inspired by the daughters of Oceanus, god of the Earth-encircling waters in Greek mythology. It begins in a hush, with muted timpani, strings, and high flutes. The ocean’s titanic power makes itself felt gradually, eventually erupting into massive surges via paired harps and majestic brass proclamations. The tumult gradually subsides, leading to an ending in relative stillness—but that’s deceptive since, as we all know, the sea is never truly still.

    Bust of Oceanus, originally found as a fountain decoration in Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, Italy, currently housed at the Vatican Museums. Credit: Carole Raddato
    Portrait of Jennifer Higdon. Credit: J.D. Scott

    Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

    Cello Concerto (2025)

    Pulitzer Prize laureate Jennifer Higdon has written a veritable cornucopia of concertos—for orchestra, harp, low brass, mandolin, oboe, percussion, piano, soprano sax, trombone, tuba, viola, violin, and two violins plus double bass. Such bounty reflects her popularity with both audiences and performers alike, thanks to commissions from instrumentalists such as percussionist Collin Currie and violinist Hilary Hahn. Equally influenced by rock groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as by her symphonic predecessors, Higdon has developed a musical language that builds on the practices of the past without being enslaved by them.

    Now she has given us a new concerto, this time for cellist Julian Schwarz, noted for the intense lyricism and tonal beauty of his style. “Julian has an incredible sound,” Higdon tells us, “and I really wanted to show off his playing.”

    That isn’t always easy with cello concertos, which until the late 19th century were usually spurned by composers who were convinced that the inherent sonic imbalance between cello and orchestra could not be successfully overcome. In 1894 Antonín Dvořák broke through brilliantly with his magnificent cello concerto, thereby opening a path for later composers. Higdon knows well the challenges of writing an effective cello concerto, and to that end she has included “many chamber music-like passages where it’s just Julian and a couple of instruments.”

    The concerto is laid out in four sections, ranging from a narrative opening (“Poet”) to dancelike passages (“Dances”) that call on virtuosity from soloist and orchestra alike. A midway “Fervent” provides an emotional heart center, while the final “Lines” pulls together all the disparate elements from the concerto as a whole.

    Béla Bartók (1881–1945)

    Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

    Unlike Sibelius, Bartók made multiple trips to America, culminating in a 1940 visit that turned out to be permanent as he and his family fled the rise of fascism in his homeland. It began promisingly enough, with a well-paid position at Columbia University as a visiting ethnomusicologist as well as an extended concert tour through the Midwest and West Coast.

    By 1942 things were falling apart. The Columbia gig had been for one year only. Work was scarce, income was low, and his health became a serious concern, with the onset of what would eventually be diagnosed as leukemia. By 1943 he was wraithlike at 87 pounds and hospitalized when he received a commission for an extended orchestral piece from Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and an indefatigable force in modern music.

    Bartók doubted that he had another major composition in him, but happily for posterity, he rallied. He started the project in August 1943 and two months later gifted humanity with the glorious Concerto for Orchestra. Given its premiere performance in Boston on December 1, 1944, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. (Nota bene: it didn’t hurt any that Koussevitzky and the BSO played the spots off the thing. We have a broadcast dub from a subsequent performance on December 30, and it’s a knockout.)

    Béla Bartók, 1943

    Although the work’s scope is symphonic, Bartók used the term ‘concerto’ in the sense of individual instruments, or small groups, highlighted within the larger orchestral ensemble à la Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos. Laid out in Bartók’s preferred five-movement ‘arch’ form, it offers two substantial outer movements, two lighter interludes in second and fourth place, and a central elegy at the work’s emotional core. The opening movement’s slow introduction belies the power and energy to come in a robust structure that subjects brief melodic units to no end of brilliant manipulation and development. The following ‘game of pairs’ combines charm and light whimsy in a dancelike affair that presents its material via paired instruments. In third place comes a magnificently somber ‘elegy’ of mournful dignity and reserve.

    Bartók was irritated by the attention being lavished on Shostakovich’s 7th “Leningrad” symphony, a new arrival he considered trite, banal, and obnoxiously bombastic. He vented his spleen in the Concerto’s ‘interrupted intermezzo’ in which a gently rocking main reprise gives way to the Nazi marching theme from the Shostakovich symphony—it’s actually a quote from Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow—in a blistering orchestral takedown, complete with fortissimo Bronx cheers. To conclude, an exhilarating Finale combines sophisticated compositional technique with all the energy of a high-spirited folk festival.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 26-27 Season begins with SIBELIUS, HIGDON, AND BARTÓK on Saturday, September 26 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, September 27 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  6. Program Notes — SCHUBERT IN VIENNA

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    Harmoniemusik in Vienna

    Music for wind band (harmoniemusik) was long a Viennese mainstay. In a land filled with music-loving aristocrats who couldn’t afford a resident full-time orchestra, a wind ensemble (harmonie), typically made up of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons, provided a handy source for the ‘table music’ (tafelmusik) that accompanied dinners, garden parties, and the like. In fact, Emperor Joseph himself maintained a first-class harmonie, drawn from the principal wind players of the Imperial opera.

    Music Director Donato Cabrera tells us that “the narrative and focus of this concert is the importance and predominance of the harmoniemusik (wind ensemble) in Viennese music, and I’ve chosen music from the classical, romantic, and 20th century to tell this story.”

    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

    Excerpts from Don Giovanni (1788, arr. 1803)

    “Well, I am up to the eyes in work, for by Sunday week I have to arrange my opera for wind-instruments. If I don’t, someone will anticipate me and secure the profits” wrote Mozart to his father Leopold. The opera was The Abduction from the Seraglio, and like all composers of successful operas, Mozart wanted the extra cash to be had from a harmoniemusik suite drawn from the opera’s arias and instrumental numbers.

    Mozart’s 1788 Don Giovanni even incorporates a harmonie during the finale’s banquet scene; the group plays selections from various recent hit operas, including Mozart’s own The Marriage of Figaro. However, Mozart didn’t give us a harmoniemusik suite for Don Giovanni, and that’s where Josef Tribensee’s 1803 arrangement for wind band – no singing – comes in handy. This performance features five selections in their modern updates by Andreas Tarkmann, beginning with the Overture, then skipping to Leporello’s quick-talking slither out of a jam as he is mistaken for the dastardly Don by some extremely annoyed people. Then fast-forward to the end, with three numbers: the Don and Leporello invite the ‘stone guest’ to dinner, the animated statue carts the Don off to the underworld, and then the Finale ultimo, the original of which is often omitted in stage productions.

    Statue of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Ludwig Michael Schwanthaler at Mozart-Mozartplatz Salzburg.
    Friedrich Gulda by Erich Auerbach, 1966.

    Friedrich Gulda (1930–2000)

    Cello Concerto (1980)

    “I don’t want to fall into the routine of the modern concert pianist’s life, nor do I want to ride the cheap triumphs of the Baroque bandwagon.” Not much chance of that. Friedrich Gulda was sui generis, an artist who took eclecticism to the bleeding edge and then some, a pianist who played some recitals in the nude, a guy who faked his own death to get a sense of his post-mortem publicity, a superlative interpreter of the Viennese classics à la Beethoven and Mozart, a jazz collaborator with the likes of Chick Corea, the acclaimed teacher of such worthies as Claudio Abbado and Martha Argerich, and a fascinating – albeit quirky – composer.

    As Gulda’s 1980 Cello Concerto commences, unprepared listeners might experience a mental gulp: oh, sheesh, what have I gotten myself into? This is no traditional concerto. It’s like something out of an episode of Miami Vice. But then the brassy jazz combo gives way to what is essentially a classic harmonie – wind instruments joining the cello in beguiling lyricism. Then the combo resumes all that urban bling. Further movements explore the dichotomy of new (brass) versus old (wind), in idioms suggesting Mozart, Schubert, Lalo Shifrin, folk dances, and maybe even Jerome Kern. An extended central cello cadenza, some of it improvised, stands at the heart of the work. The finale breaks free of all restraint: circus music? Keystone Kops? Looney Tunes? Whatever you call it, the thing’s utterly exhilarating.

    Not your usual cello concerto, in other words. But then again, Friedrich Gulda wasn’t your usual musician.

    Watercolor portrait of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder, 1825.

    Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

    Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944 (1825)

    When Franz Schubert was busy composing – which was most of the time – he could be exasperatingly distant, even to his closest friends. In 1824 the painter Moritz von Schwind noted with wry amusement that “if you go to see him during the day, he says, ‘Hello, how are you?—Good’ and goes on writing.” Schubert’s focused industry made him prolific, but it has frustrated his biographers, who must attempt détente with an artist who dwelled largely in the privacy of his own mind. So Schubert remains elusive, even after two centuries. If an aura of mystery is an essential component of our ideal of the Romantic artist, then Schubert – appealing, ambiguous, and ultimately enigmatic – embodies that ideal to perfection.

    The mystery extends to Schubert’s final (more or less) symphony. For a good long time scholars considered it to be a product of that last hyper-productive year of 1828, as he raced against his deteriorating health. But it seems that he started it around 1825, quite probably during one of his very few vacations, on tour with friend and colleague Johann Michael Vogl. Schubert was reported as having begun a C Major symphony while in Gmunden and Bad Gastein. That symphony, which would have been his seventh, was once dubbed the “Gasteiner” and considered lost until analysis of the manuscript paper of the Ninth Symphony pointed to an 1825 origin, rather than 1826 as once thought. Thus Schubert’s mightiest and most noble symphony turns out to have been a product, at least in part, of that happy summer, while the erstwhile “Gasteiner” symphony has floated away to the musicological bardo. First performed in 1838, the Ninth took a good long while to achieve repertory status.

    In his last compositions Schubert tended to go wide, and that’s very much in evidence with this broadly-conceived symphony that contrasts gentle rusticism with noble expansiveness, whimsy with melancholy, and sunlight with shadow. Maestro Cabrera has noted that the wind band takes a leading role, as the main themes are typically introduced by the winds before the strings. As a result, the orchestra will take a slightly different seating than usual, with the wind instruments up front and center, acknowledging the principal roles they play in this cherished monument of early Romanticism.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 25-26 Season continues with SCHUBERT IN VIENNA, on Saturday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, January 25 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  7. Program Notes — BEETHOVEN’S EROICA

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer
    Credit: Jiyang Chen

    Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)

    Overture (2022)

    Musicians come in all sizes, shapes, and skillsets. Some are one-trick ponies, but their tricks are really good. Others might encompass multiple disciplines – pianist-composers, composer-conductors, performer-teachers, and the like.

    And there are those who embrace the whole. That’s where Jessie Montgomery comes in: violinist, teacher, and composer with an expansive vision and a deep commitment to social justice. Happily, she is a ‘composer for everybody’ – i.e., not inclined to write impenetrable scores that nobody actually wants to play or hear. Montgomery composes approachable, listenable, and playable music that people like. She gets a lot of commissions. That’s good.

    Montgomery describes her 2022 Overture as “a one-movement orchestral tutti steeped in harmonic textures inspired by a fusion between jazz and American classical harmonies, Baroque rhythmic gestures, and polyphonic tension.” The overriding mood is actually pretty serious; very largely string-based (although the entire orchestra is eventually employed,) the Overture carves out a large-scale journey from minor modality (very much on tap at the beginning) to major mode (via a sustained major triad at the end.)

    Portrait of the Mozart Family, 1780-1781, attributed to Johann Nepomuk della Croce. From left to right, Marianne Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Anna Maria Mozart, and Leopold Mozart.

    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

    Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 (1785)

    Mozart’s move to Vienna in 1781 acts as a dividing line in his biography. Before Vienna he was a promising young composer with some substantial achievements to his credit; in Vienna he became Mozart, ever since cherished, celebrated, even mythologized. In 1781 he was 25 years old, precisely the right age to strike out on his own, free from Salzburg and his father’s suffocating control, responsible to nobody except himself.

    He prospered in Vienna, as opera productions, concerts, and commissions ensured him a decent livelihood. Like any creative artist, he had his fallow periods and abandoned projects. But his output during that decade in Vienna is nothing short of miraculous. The tragic disease – we may never know precisely what it was – that took him away just short of his 36th birthday robbed humanity of untold treasures yet to come. What we have is beyond price.

    There’s an oft-told story about Mozart’s father Leopold, kapellmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg and a persistent, if well-intentioned, thorn in his son’s side. Leopold arrived in Vienna at 1:00 PM on Friday the 11th of February, 1785 and was immediately swept up into a madcap scene as Wolfgang and a team of copyists scrambled to prepare the orchestral parts for a concerto due to be premiered that very evening. Somehow it all got done, and that night Wolfgang’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor K. 466 – a crown jewel of Western music – was revealed to the world. But the story, good as it is, doesn’t end there. Wolfgang wrote another pianoconcerto during Leopold’s month-long visit: No. 21 in C Major K. 467, which brims over with sunny joy and breathtaking lyricism.

    The chipper march rhythm that opens the first movement sets the mood for the elegantly structured tune-fest to come. The second-place Andante opens with a melody so beguiling that it has been popularized twice – once as the theme song for a now-forgotten movie, and again by no less than Neil Diamond. In the Allegro vivace assai the concerto returns securely to earth in a finale so exuberantly dance-like as to be a kissing cousin to a polka.

    Title page of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, with the original dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte ripped out.

    Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

    Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 “Eroica” (1805)

    Music changed forever on the afternoon of April 7, 1805, the first public performance of Beethoven’s newest symphony. By now the Viennese had a general idea of what to expect from their most newsworthy musician. Something along the lines of his previous two symphonies, perhaps: a slow introduction leading into a rambunctious first movement, three assorted movements following, the whole rather like a supercharged Haydn symphony.

    What the Viennese got that day was not so much a symphony as it was a revolution. Nothing could have prepared them for the experience about to unfold, starting with the very opening: two brutal hammerblows from massed strings and brass followed by a seething, intense, and muscular first movement that lasted an ear-popping fifteen minutes. But length did not imply laxness; quite the opposite in fact. Tightly woven and meticulously organized via a few simple motives, it stands amongst the most imposing structural achievements in Western art. This is music-making in the grandest manner, combining the meticulous precision of a master clockmaker with the all-encompassing vision of a Michelangelo. And it changed the rules. As a beam of light can be bent off its course by a strong gravitational field, the evolution of the symphony was irrevocably altered by the first movement of the Eroica. 

    An appallingly tragic funeral march followed, unrelenting in its lugubriousness for the most part, save a few relatively gentle episodes. No doubt some listeners were expecting something lighter to follow, since the traditional third movement is a dance of some sort, typically a Minuet – although Beethoven had already made clear that he had little to no truck with twee courtly dances. Nor did he cater to the elevated-pinky contingent in this symphony. Instead, the Viennese were treated to a downright manic scherzo movement, joyful to be sure, but also just a bit unhinged.

    About forty minutes had passed so far, with the wrap-up fourth movement still to go. If some in the audience were holding out for a vivacious lark of a finale, something short and sweet and toe-tappy, those hopes were dashed. Beethoven swept them up into a staggering tour de force that starts with an utterly insignificant bit of musical puffery – a bass line he had used previously for his Creatures of Prometheus ballet music – then proceeds to shepherd that wisp of an idea through an unprecedented blend of sonata form and variation that culminates in a cosmic vision of utter grandeur before ending in a wild-and-woolly final peroration.

    It’s a well-known story how Beethoven, infuriated by Napoleon’s proclamation of himself as Emperor, scraped off the symphony’s original dedication to Bonaparte with such vehemence as to rip a hole on the title page. Thus the Bonaparte Symphony became the Eroica. No matter what the title, it is no mere symphony. Rather, it stands as the hinge between Classicism and Romanticism, the glorious herald that announced the arrival of a new order.

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 25-26 Season continues with BEETHOVENS EROICA, on Saturday, November 15 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 16 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  8. Program Notes — PICTURES FROM PARIS

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

    Boléro (1928)

    The Palais Garnier ca. 1900, where Boléro premiered in 1928.

    Within two years of its premiere at the Paris Ópera with famed danseuse Ida Rubinstein, Boléro had been conducted by Piero Coppola, Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky, Arturo Toscanini, and Ravel himself. Four years later it was the background to a Carole Lombard movie titled, not surprisingly, Bolero. It has popped up in arrangements and adaptations by Frank Zappa and Rufus Wainwright. It was the background music for a fight scene between Kirk and Spock in the original Star Trek series. It has been heard on Doctor Who. Bo Derek made memorable use of it, as did Olympic ice skaters Torvill and Dean. It has been praised, reviled, interpreted, and analyzed. It has earned a king’s ransom in royalties.

    Boléro. Perhaps the best-known orchestral work of the 20th century, it knocked ‘em dead in its original 1928 ballet incarnation and has sailed on merrily (and orchestrally) ever since. Ravel fashioned his ubiquitous masterpiece to a disarmingly simple recipe: 1) place a languorous, almost serpentine melody over a hypnotically repetitive rhythm, then 2) repeat ad infinitem, providing each iteration with increasingly lavish and sonorous orchestration. Thus Boléro progresses from whisper-soft to Richter-scale volume levels within about fifteen minutes. Nothing else happens save a searing fanfare at the very end.

    Despite various philosophical interpretations that have been layered on the work over the years, Ravel was quite straightforward about his brainchild. In 1931 he explained that: “[Boléro] constitutes an experiment in a very special and limited direction, and should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve.”

    Portrait of George Gershwin, 1937, by Carl Van Vechten.

    George Gershwin (1898–1937)

    An American in Paris (1928)

    Highbrow pundits never quite knew what to do about George Gershwin. That such a more or less self-taught Broadway tunesmith presumed to write ambitious concert works was annoying enough. That he was often boisterously successful with those same works was even more irritating. Some critics vented their umbrage via potshots at Gershwin’s perceived technical shortcomings. Others dismissed his works as mere passing fancies, such as the New York Evening Post’sOscar Thompson, who allowed that while An American in Paris might be all the rage circa 1928, “to conceive of a symphony audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter.”

    Raised patrician pinkies notwithstanding, conductors knew a good thing when they heard it and snapped the piece up. The 1929 midwestern premiere was led by no less than Fritz Reiner, soon to be followed by such luminaries as Artur Rodzinski, Alfredo Casella, and erstwhile San Francisco Symphony maestro Henry Hadley. Even Arturo Toscanini – nobody’s choice as an advocate for American music – turned in a whipcrack rendition with the NBC Symphony. The first studio recording, with Nathaniel Shilkret conducting the Victor Symphony and featuring an uncredited George Gershwin Himself on celesta, took place on February 4, 1929, less than two months after the New York premiere. Umpteen performances and recordings later, An American in Paris dances blithely towards its centennial, bedrock repertory, familiar and loved the world over. Far more than a mere Jazz Age travelogue, this quintessentially American symphonic poem unfolds with radiant vitality.

    An American in Paris eschews formal symphonic development in favor of a loose episodic structure charting the adventures of an American tourist sampling the glories of Paris amidst fits of homesickness. The work’s most compelling features are its marvelous melodies – who isn’t enchanted by the central “blues” section with its wailing trumpet solo? – and its glittering orchestration, featuring that quacking quartet of Parisian taxi horns. “It’s not a Beethoven symphony, you know,” commented Gershwin, perhaps in reaction to elitist reservations about the work’s overriding joie de vivre. “If it pleases symphony audiences as a light, jolly piece, a series of impressions musically expressed, it succeeds.”

    Modest Mussorgsky (1839­–1881), orch. Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

    Pictures at an Exhibition (1874, orch. 1922)

    The familiar claim that great art cannot be created by committee is sorely challenged by Pictures at an Exhibition, an undisputed masterpiece that may have been written by a single composer but involved the significant contributions of an artist (Viktor Hartmann), an editor (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), and a field of orchestrators (including Sir Henry Wood, Maurice Ravel, and Leopold Stokowski.)

    Mussorgsky and the artist Viktor Hartmann met sometime around 1870. Their mutual devotion to nurturing a native Russian art encouraged the blossoming of a solid friendship, cut tragically short when Hartmann died in 1873 at the age of 39. A year later the influential critic Viktor Stasov helped to organize a showing of Hartmann’s works at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. That exhibition inspired Mussorgsky to plunge into the composition of Pictures at an Exhibition, originally titled Hartmann. Six weeks later the work was finished, although it was never to be performed publicly during Mussorgsky’s lifetime.

    Music lovers are sometimes unaware that Mussorgsky wrote Pictures for solo piano; its history of orchestral transcription runs deep. In fact, the first known public performance of the work, in November 1891, was an abridged orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov’s student Mikhail Tushmalov. Since then, approximately thirty orchestral transcriptions have been made of Pictures at an Exhibition.

    Maurice Ravel’s masterful 1922 orchestration has become the de facto standard. Despite his fastidious disdain for Mussorgsky’s crudity, Ravel was a bonafide Russophile who could not help but respond to Pictures’s kaleidoscopic imagery. The celebrated result seamlessly blends two contrasting cultures in a milestone of orchestral writing.

    Pictures at an Exhibition charts the course of visitors strolling through a gallery of Hartmann’s various paintings, sketches, and architectural fantasies. A Promenade theme acts as a musical museum guide, accompanying us from picture to picture as make our way along. It all culminates with Hartmann’s architectural design for The Great Gate of Kiev, originally intended for a civic competition. The gate itself was never built, but it lives on in Mussorgsky’s powerful portrait.

    Viktor Hartmann, the artist whose works inspired Pictures at an Exhibition

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 25-26 Season begins with PICTURES FROM PARIS on Saturday, September 27 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, September 28 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  9. Program Notes — UNFINISHED BRUCKNER

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    Scott Foglesong Program Note Writer

    Unfinished Nobility

    A special corner of the repertory is reserved for those works that are highly valued despite (or because of) being left incomplete by their authors. It’s quite the honor roll: Bach’s The Art of Fugue, Mozart’s Requiem and C Minor Mass, Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. To that we can add the two most tantalizing of all: Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8, and Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9, left incomplete at Bruckner’s death.

    Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

    Symphony No. 8 in B Minor “Unfinished” D. 759 (1822)

    3D modeling of Schubert by Hadi Karimi in 2020. Karimi referenced a photo of the cast impression of Schubert’s death mask, his spectacles on display at the Wien Museum, and a portrait by Anton Depauly from 1828.

    The “Unfinished” symphony barely escaped oblivion. In 1822 Schubert sent the first two movements – all he ever completed – to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner in Graz. At that point the manuscript disappeared for 40 years, only to reappear in 1865 when the now elderly Hüttenbrenner gave the manuscript to conductor Johann von Herbeck, who lost no time bringing this remarkable torso of a symphony to the world’s attention.

    “Every heart rejoiced,” exclaimed critic Eduard Hanslick of the December 1865 premiere, “as if, after a long separation, the composer himself were amongst us in person.” If so, then the Franz Schubert there in person was most indubitably not the cherubic little guy already being typecast as chronically lovesick and misunderstood. ThisFranz Schubert was a brooding Romantic, downright Byronic in his volatile moods, master of symphonic form and orchestration, and the resurrected Eighth Symphony was an exponential advance over his earlier symphonies.

    Which makes it all the more of a shame that it isn’t finished. Nobody really knows why. Theories have been floated, of course, just as completions have been offered. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that Schubert definitely did mean to finish it. The first movement opens in a darkness that is broken only fitfully by patches of light – the familiar second theme, for example – but on the whole it sustains a sense of Gothic gloom throughout. In the tender, lyrical second movement, Schubert the master orchestrator gives prevalent solos to both clarinet and horn, both instruments often associated with “romantic” moods.

    Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)

    Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (1894–96)

    Nowadays it’s easy to get to Ansfelden, Austria. Just take the A1 westbound out of Vienna and after a while Ansfelden will be on your left, immediately following the exit for central Linz. Ansfelden turns out to be a prosperous residential suburb basking in that comfortable family-oriented middle-class lifestyle familiar throughout the developed modern world.

    Ansfelden, Austria

    Anton Bruckner was born in an Ansfelden that was an impoverished rural hamlet with more cows than people and shortages of food and decent jobs. It must have seemed like the end of nowhere to a talented young chap like Anton Bruckner, son of a village schoolmaster. His father got him started in music, then in his early teens he was sent off to the nearby Augustinian monastery of Sankt Florian, where he became the organist, then ditto in nearby Linz.

    It was a quiet, unassuming life. In 1868 he relocated to teach at the Vienna Conservatory and things got a lot more complicated. The shy and unsophisticated Bruckner, a village and monastery man down to his toes, was a poor fit for Vienna’s toxic musical politics. But he persisted amidst a steady barrage of critical attacks, continued to produce luxuriantly epic symphonies, and eventually found a certain measure of success with Viennese musicians and their notoriously fickle public. He stayed unmarried – not for lack of trying – and died in his humble but comfortable Vienna apartment at the age of 72. It took a while for posterity to catch on, but catch on it did and nowadays Bruckner enjoys an enviable reputation as a supreme master of the late Romantic symphony. His music even survived being appropriated by the Nazis, a tribute indeed to its fundamental nobility and goodness.

    Bruckner began work on what turned out to be his last symphony in 1887, but it wasn’t long before he became sidelined on revisions of several of his earlier symphonies. As of 1894 he was still making sporadic progress, and by 1896 he had completed the first three movements.

    And that’s where it stopped. Bruckner died on October 11, 1896 with the third-movement Adagio finished after numerous false starts, revisions, and retries. One of his friends, Ferdinand Löwe, prepared a performing version of the three-movement symphony for its official premiere in 1903, but Löwe couldn’t resist tinkering with Bruckner’s original, very much to the symphony’s detriment. It wasn’t until 1932 that the world finally heard the Ninth as Bruckner intended it. Since then, there have been numerous attempts at re-creating a fourth movement, but all dwell in the realm of speculation, no matter how well-founded their intentions. The Ninth, as Bruckner handed it down to posterity, is a three-movement symphony.

    But what a three movements! Vast, brooding, powerful, exultant, introspective, menacing, comforting … the list of descriptive adjectives is more or less endless. The Bruckner Ninth offers a musical demonstration of the old parable of the blind men and the elephant – each comes to a different conclusion about what’s actually there, depending on which part of the elephant he’s feeling. The first movement begins much like Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, with a sense of the very creation of it all taking place before us. It makes its way with all due majesty through at least three main themes and great spans of developmental action before concluding in an almost overwhelming wall of sound.

    The second movement, on the other hand, is a fiery scherzo, its searing demeanor slightly ameliorated by a gentler interlude that makes a game attempt at playfulness but is soon engulfed in the overriding turbulence. Then comes the Adagio finale, a sustained essay in ecstatic radiance interrupted by angst-ridden outbursts. It ends as it can only end for this most spiritually-aware of composers, with a sense of calm acceptance and consolation.nephew Vladimir ‘Bob’ Davydov, “and I love it as I have never before loved one of my musical offspring.”

    Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony. He also leads the California Symphony’s ground-breaking music education course for adults Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed.

    The 24-25 CROWNING ACHIEVEMENTS Season concludes with UNFINISHED BRUCKNER, on Saturday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, May 4 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. 

  10. Why Do People Think Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Ends Early?

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    Tchaikovsky at his home in Frolovskoye, a village in the Klin district of Moscow oblast, 1890.

    The third movement (Allegro molto vivace) is a thrilling, triumphant march, full of energy and momentum. After the deep emotions of the earlier movements, it builds to a rousing, powerful climax that feels like the grand finale. The music surges to a victorious conclusion—one so convincing that many assume the symphony is over.

    “What usually happens at this point,” explains Donato Cabrera, Artistic and Music Director, “is that the audience is compelled, justifiably so, to clap in appreciation. The conductor immediately begins the fourth movement, in a vain, futile, and often comical attempt to quelch the inevitable clapping. Half the audience claps, the other half shushes the clappers, and the conductor has a pained, disapproving grimace for a good portion of the last movement. 

    What should matter the most, which is the incredible anguish found at the very beginning of the last movement, is completely lost in the kerfuffle. In Tchaikovsky’s day, it would’ve been entirely acceptable and, indeed, encouraged to clap between every movement, allowing patrons to remain engaged and appreciative for the entire evening.”

    Hear Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) live at TCHAIKOVSKY PASSION, on Saturday, March 22 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 23 at 4 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. Single tickets start at $50 and at $25 for students 25 and under, and include a free 30-minute pre-concert talk starting one hour before the performance. Buy tickets online or call or visit the Lesher Center Ticket Office at 925.943.7469, Wed – Sun, 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m.