23 Season 2019-2020

Friday, November 29, at 8:00 The Philadelphia Orchestra Saturday, November 30, at 8:00 Susanna Mälkki Conductor Gil Shaham Violin

Jolas A Little Summer Suite First Philadelphia Orchestra performances

Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 71 I. Allegro ma non troppo II. Larghetto— III. Rondo: Allegro

Intermission

ProkofievSymphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100 I. Andante II. Allegro marcato III. Adagio IV. Allegro giocoso

This program runs approximately 2 hours, 5 minutes.

These concerts are part of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s WomenNOW and BeethovenNOW celebrations.

Philadelphia Orchestra concerts are broadcast on WRTI 90.1 FM on Sunday afternoons at 1 PM, and are repeated on Monday evenings at 7 PM on WRTI HD 2. Visit www.wrti.org to listen live or for more details. 24 The Philadelphia Orchestra Jessica Griffin

The Philadelphia Orchestra community centers, the Mann Through concerts, tours, is one of the world’s Center to Penn’s Landing, residencies, and recordings, preeminent orchestras. classrooms to hospitals, and the Orchestra is a global It strives to share the over the airwaves and online. ambassador. It performs transformative power of The Orchestra continues annually at Carnegie Hall, music with the widest to discover new and the Saratoga Performing possible audience, and to inventive ways to nurture its Arts Center, and the Bravo! create joy, connection, and relationship with loyal patrons. Vail Music Festival. The excitement through music The Philadelphia Orchestra Orchestra also has a rich in the Philadelphia region, continues the tradition of history of touring, having across the country, and educational and community first performed outside around the world. Through engagement for listeners Philadelphia in the earliest innovative programming, of all ages. It launched its days of its founding. It was robust educational initiatives, HEAR initiative in 2016 to the first American orchestra and an ongoing commitment become a major force for to perform in the People’s to the communities that it good in every community that Republic of China in 1973, serves, the ensemble is on a it serves. HEAR is a portfolio launching a now-five-decade path to create an expansive of integrated initiatives commitment of people-to- future for classical music, that promotes Health, people exchange. and to further the place champions music Education, The Orchestra also makes of the arts in an open and enables broad Access to live recordings available on democratic society. Orchestra performances, and popular digital music services Yannick Nézet-Séguin is now maximizes impact through and as part of the Orchestra in his eighth season as the Research. The Orchestra’s on Demand section of its eighth music director of The award-winning education and website. Under Yannick’s Philadelphia Orchestra. His community initiatives engage leadership, the Orchestra connection to the ensemble’s over 50,000 students, returned to recording, with musicians has been praised families, and community five celebrated CDs on by both concertgoers and members through programs the prestigious Deutsche critics, and he is embraced such as PlayINs, side-by- Grammophon label. The by the musicians of the sides, PopUP concerts, Free Orchestra also reaches Orchestra, audiences, and Neighborhood Concerts, thousands of radio listeners the community. School Concerts, sensory- with weekly broadcasts on Your Philadelphia Orchestra friendly concerts, the School WRTI-FM and SiriusXM. For takes great pride in its Partnership Program and more information, please visit hometown, performing for the School Ensemble Program, www.philorch.org. people of Philadelphia year- and All City Orchestra round, from Verizon Hall to Fellowships. 25 Conductor

Simon Fowler Conductor Susanna Mälkki returns to The Philadelphia Orchestra for the first time since her 2014 debut. She continues to guest conduct the world’s leading ensembles, with 2019–20 appearances including return visits to the New York, London, and Munich philharmonics; the Cleveland Orchestra; the Boston, Chicago, and London symphonies; and the Orchestre National de Lyon. She also debuts with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Monte- Carlo Philharmonic. Recent engagements include the Vienna Symphony and the Vienna Radio Symphony (as a Vienna Konzerthaus “Portrait” artist), the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the Radio France Philharmonic. Ms. Mälkki is in her fourth season as chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic, with highlights including premieres by leading national composers Kaija Saariaho and Lotta Wennäkoski and a new work by Felipe Lara (co- commissioned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, featuring double bassist/vocalist Esperanza Spalding and flautist Claire Chase); a tour to Belgium; and the continuation of the orchestra’s Bartók Trilogy recordings for BIS Records. As part of her third season as principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she pays tribute to the late Oliver Knussen, programming his Violin Concerto and co-curating (with violinist Leila Josefowicz) a New Music Group concert centered on his chamber music. She also conducts Holst’s The Planets, Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite, and a new composition by Ms. Saariaho. A renowned opera conductor, Ms. Mälkki makes her debut at the Festival d’Aix en Provence in 2020, leading the world premiere of Ms. Saariaho’s new opera, Innocence. She also returns to the Opéra National de Paris to conduct Philippe Boesmans’s Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne. She has conducted at the Vienna State and Metropolitan operas and was the first woman to conduct at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, in 2011. Prior to her conducting studies she had a successful career as a cellist and from 1995 to 1998 was one of the principals of the Gothenburg Symphony. In 2011 she was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland—one of that country’s highest honors. She was also Musical America’s 2017 Conductor of the Year. 26 Soloist

Luke Ratray American violinist Gil Shaham made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1988 at the Mann Center and has performed regularly with the Philadelphians ever since. The Grammy Award-winner and Musical America “Instrumentalist of the Year” is sought after throughout the world for concerto appearances with leading orchestras and conductors. He regularly gives recitals and appears with ensembles on the world’s great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals. Highlights of recent years include the acclaimed recording and performances of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin and recitals with his long-time duo partner, pianist Akira Eguchi. Appearances with orchestra regularly include the Berlin, Israel, New York, and Los Angeles philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies; the Orchestre de Paris; as well as multi-year residencies with the orchestras of Montreal, Stuttgart, and Singapore. Mr. Shaham has recorded more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs, earning multiple Grammys, a Grand Prix du Disque, the Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice awards. Many of these recordings appear on Canary Classics, the label he founded in 2004. His recordings include 1930s Violin Concertos, Virtuoso Violin Works, Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Hebrew Melodies, The Butterfly Lovers, and many more. His most recent recording, 1930s Violin Concertos Vol. 2, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1971, Mr. Shaham moved with his parents to Israel, where he began violin studies at the age of seven, receiving annual scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1981 he made debuts with the Jerusalem Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic. In 1982, after taking first prize in Israel’s Claremont Competition, he became a scholarship student at the Juilliard School. He also studied at Columbia University. He was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990 and in 2008 received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012 he was named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America. Mr. Shaham lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius. 27 Framing the Program

This concert inaugurates The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Parallel Events BeethovenNOW series, honoring the composer’s 250th 1806 Music birthday, with his majestic Violin Concerto. It will continue Beethoven Weber with the complete piano concertos and symphonies. The Violin Concerto Symphony No. 1 program also continues the season-long WomenNOW Literature initiative, featuring women innovators and creators, with Armin and Betsy Jolas’s A Little Summer Suite. She composed the Brentano work in 2015 on the eve of her 90th birthday for the Berlin Des Knaben Philharmonic. It offers what she calls “wandering music” Wunderhorn Art that “seems aimless and could land anywhere at any time.” Constable Jolas likens the seven-section Suite to what the Russian Windermere composer Modest Musorgsky did a century and a half History earlier in his Pictures from an Exhibition. Formal Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is now such a familiar concert dissolution of favorite that it may be surprising to learn how long it took the Holy Roman to enter the general repertoire. In this majestic piece Empire Beethoven did not so much aim to dazzle with virtuoso 1944 Music technique (not that he makes anything easy for the Prokofiev Barber soloist) as to infuse a seriousness of purpose associated Symphony Symphony No. 2 with his symphonies. Beethoven’s contemporaries were No. 5 Literature somewhat baffled by this ambition and it was only later Camus in the 19th century, through the advocacy of the great Caligula violinist Joseph Joachim, that the Concerto won its rightful Art place with the public. Rivera The Rug Weaver Although Sergei Prokofiev immigrated to the West from History his native Russia in 1918, soon after the Revolution, he D-Day landings decided to return for good nearly two decades later. He in Normandy composed his epic Fifth Symphony during the summer of 1944, as the fortunes of the Soviet Union were finally beginning to turn in what had been devastating years during the Second World War. The composer led the premiere in January, the last time he conducted before health issues curtailed his activities. The stirring Symphony registers a wide range of emotions reflective of its time and earned the composer international accolades.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world with three weekly broadcasts on SiriusXM’s Symphony Hall, Channel 76, on Mondays at 7 PM, Thursdays at 12 AM, and Saturdays at 4 PM. 28 The Music A Little Summer Suite

Proceeding through her 90s, and giving every sign of doing so with serenity and cheerfulness as well as her customary keen intelligence, Betsy Jolas is one of our rare living witnesses to the heyday of Modernism. Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Henri Matisse were guests at the family home as she was growing up, her parents being the founder-editors of the magazine transition. In Paris, after the Second World War, she studied with Olivier Messiaen and eagerly followed the new musical developments brought in by her near contemporaries, such as Betsy Jolas Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Luciano Berio. She Born in Paris, August 5, admired their theoretical rigor, their precision of imagination. 1926 All the time, though, she was forming her own vision of a Now living there music with the lyrical lines, the intricate counterpoint, and the glow of the Renaissance masters she had come to love as a choral singer, with Roland de Lassus her outstanding model. Yet what she wanted was not backward-looking. There would have to be a contemporary restlessness. The result was a music all her own—fresh, airy, and subtly colored—that she has gone on discovering through an output that includes chamber pieces (including a sequence of seven quartets) and choral settings as well as orchestral scores. She wrote A Little Summer Suite in 2015 for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, creating it as a wander through a sequence of sound scenes, with a nod to the walking tour of an art exhibit that Modest Musorgsky recreated in Pictures from an Exhibition. In its short life, the piece has made quite a tour of its own, going on from Berlin to Stockholm, London, and Boulder, Colorado, then to Tanglewood last summer, and now here to Philadelphia. A Closer Look Like Musorgsky, Jolas opens her piece, which is on the compact scale of 11 or 12 minutes, with walking music largely in even-note values, but her “stroll” is strikingly somber, made perhaps as if under threat. A delicate wash of rainstick and cymbal provides the background for cellos and basses to come forward from a low register, joined by other instruments in a tiny movement that rapidly grows into a tutti. An urgent, vocal quality to the music is immediately present, and although Jolas’s music is not explicitly thematic, it does have a distinctive melodic and harmonic character that will persist through the whole piece. 29

A Little Summer Suite was Percussion instruments again initiate the first larger section, composed in 2015. “Clocks and knocks,” with tickings in different rhythms that These are the first Philadelphia gradually spread through the orchestra. These must be Orchestra performances of the clocks, the knocks beginning when the strings surge the work, and the first time forward with an impassioned gesture. If there was threat the Orchestra has performed before, it is now being realized—and we in turn come to anything by the composer. realize that the work’s benign title is a cover for music of The score calls for three powerful drive and feeling. One final “knock” evaporates, flutes (III doubling alto flute and a clarinet brings back the walking music. This time, and piccolo), three oboes (III however, we are “strolling about,” and the principal line doubling English horn), three accordingly shifts around the orchestra, through the clarinets (III doubling bass woodwinds, into a solo violin, and on. clarinet), three bassoons (III In the second scene, the “shakes” are tremolando shivers doubling contrabassoon), four and the “quakes” larger disintegrations. The change to horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, the next, short walking passage is clear, for now we are percussion (bongos, claves, “strolling under” and the steps are those of the orchestra’s crotale, glass chimes, gong, lowest instruments: bass clarinet and bassoons, tuba, and maracas, marimba, metal double basses. These steps take us to the third and longest blocks, military drum, rain stick, scene, most of which offers “chants” from solo woodwind side drum, sizzle cymbals, snare instruments: oboe, clarinet, English horn, and, more briefly, drum, suspended cymbals, flute. Each keeps to its own chant as they interweave with tam-tams, temple blocks, tom- one another and overlap, with surrounding atmospheres toms, triangle, vibraphone, and punctuation coming from the rest of the orchestra. The wood blocks, wood chimes, section then closes with two mounting “cheers.” Out of the wooden boards), harp, piano, second comes the walking music again, passing first from and strings. clarinet to horn. A couple of songbirds flutter across on solo Performance time is flute and violin, and the walk continues through changing approximately 11 minutes. soloists and ensembles, gaining in determination. We find we are indeed “strolling home,” for soon the rainstick is back. Now the orchestra can signal it’s all over. —Paul Griffiths 30 The Music Violin Concerto

As he entered his 30s at the turn of the 19th century, Beethoven’s personal life dramatically changed, and so, too, did his music. In letters dating from the fall of 1801 he revealed for the first time the secret of his looming deafness. Despite ever growing professional successes, he lamented how “that jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel; and it amounts to this, that for the past three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker.”

Ludwig van Beethoven The following spring Beethoven moved to the Vienna Born in Bonn, probably suburb of Heiligenstadt, where he penned the remarkable December 16, 1770 “Heiligenstadt Testament,” an unsent letter to his brothers Died in Vienna, March 26, in which he poured out his heart. After describing various 1827 social, personal, and professional consequences of his condition, such as that he could no longer hear the sounds of nature, he confessed: “Such incidents brought me almost to despair; a little more and I would have ended my life. Only my art held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me.” New Paths The challenges Beethoven faced at this crucial juncture in his life can be sensed in many of the compositions he wrote over the next decade, usually labeled as his “heroic” period. He talked of writing in a “completely new manner” and of a “new path,” producing music that proved increasingly challenging both for performers and audiences. The Third Symphony, the monumental “Eroica,” is a key work in this respect, but his first two symphonies (a genre he came to relatively late) had already been greeted with some skepticism. “Bizarre”— the word is the same in German—crops up more and more often in reviews. Beethoven initially played it somewhat safer with the genre of the concerto, partly because, as for his model Mozart before him, they were meant for his own use as a virtuoso soloist. While he held off writing a symphony, concertos came early and his involvement extends beyond the canonic five piano concertos; the “Triple” Concerto for piano, violin, and cello; and the Violin Concerto. During his student years in his native Bonn, and then after moving to Vienna at age 21, Beethoven experimented with concertos 31 for piano, for violin, and even one for oboe, but these early works are either incomplete or lost. Around 1800 he composed two attractive Romances for violin and orchestra, a sort of preview of coming attractions, specifically of the second movement of the Concerto we hear tonight. Beethoven played the violin, but he was far from the virtuoso that Mozart had been with the instrument. A Concerto for a Friend Beethoven’s Violin Concerto challenged the expectations of his contemporaries, who were more accustomed to flashy entertainment in such pieces than to works of sustained substance. It took several decades for the piece to enter the standard repertoire. Beethoven composed it in 1806 in an extremely short time, apparently about a month, for Franz Clement, an important figure in Vienna’s musical scene whom he had long admired. Clement was first violinist at the Theater an der Wien, a position that gave him the opportunity to present an annual concert for his own benefit. On April 7, 1805, he played his own Violin Concerto in D on a program that also included the first public performance of the “Eroica” Symphony. It was for Clement’s concert the next year, given on December 23, that Beethoven wrote his Violin Concerto, which he allegedly completed just before the premiere. The concert opened with an overture by Etienne Méhul followed by the new Concerto. After works by Handel, Mozart, and Cherubini, Clement improvised and then performed a “Sonata on one string played with the violin upside down” before a concluding chorus by Handel. It was thus hardly an event of sustained high-mindedness. Beethoven’s Concerto was to some extent influenced by Clement’s own from the previous year, the work that had been paired with the “Eroica.” As with that profoundly challenging symphony, some critics worried that the composer was pursuing the wrong path. The Wiener Theater-Zeitung noted that the Concerto was “received with exceptional applause due to its originality and abundance of beautiful passages” and commended Clement’s performance, but followed with a word of caution: “It is feared that if Beethhofen [sic] continues to follow his present course, it will go ill both with him and the public. The music could soon fail to please anyone not completely familiar with the rules and difficulties of the art. … [Listeners risk being] oppressed by a multitude of interconnected and overabundant ideas and a continuous tumult of the combined instruments … [and may] leave the concert with only an unpleasant feeling of exhaustion.” 32

Beethoven composed the Violin A Closer Look Beethoven establishes an unusually Concerto in 1806. meditative mood at the outset of the Concerto with an Conductor Fritz Scheel expansive orchestral introduction featuring one of his and violinist Fritz Kreisler most lyrical themes (Allegro ma non troppo)—indeed, collaborated on the first a lovely lyricism and soaring melodies in the highest Philadelphia Orchestra registers characterize much of the movement. The following performances of Beethoven’s Larghetto opens with a hymn-like theme for muted strings Violin Concerto, in January before horns and clarinet take over and the violin provides 1902. The most recent decorative commentary. This movement, in a modified subscription performances were variation form, leads without pause to the lively and dance- in November 2016, with Midori like Rondo finale that more overtly showcases virtuosic and conductor Louis Langrée. playing for the soloist. The Orchestra has recorded Beethoven was asked a couple of years later to transform the work only once, in 1950 the work into a piano concerto, which was then published for CBS, with soloist Zino Francescatti and in London. While the orchestral parts are the same, the Eugene Ormandy. violin solo is arranged for piano. It is not entirely clear how much of this version was actually Beethoven’s own work; The Concerto is scored for an not many musicians today find the result persuasive, which orchestra of solo violin, flute, means it is rarely performed, although a few recordings are two oboes, two clarinets, two available. The arrangement is of some interest, however, bassoons, two horns, two because while Beethoven did not write any cadenzas for trumpets, timpani, and strings. the Violin Concerto, he did for the piano arrangement. Performance time is Neither version was often performed during Beethoven’s approximately 45 minutes. lifetime, nor even in the 1830s, as the work was widely viewed as “ungrateful” and “unplayable.” The great violinist Joseph Joachim is credited for championing the Concerto beginning in 1844, when, as a 12-year-old virtuoso, he played it with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the London Philharmonic Society. In the absence of any cadenzas by Beethoven, Joachim’s were widely played for many years until displaced by Fritz Kreisler’s, which we hear tonight. —Christopher H. Gibbs 33 The Music Symphony No. 5

One is hard pressed to identify positive things associated with the horrors of war. Yet composers, like other artists through the ages, have often used their creative gifts to deal with tragedy and their music has helped others to cope as well. The Second World War inspired an unusually large quantity of significant music and nowhere more so than in the genre of the symphony. Some of them were written in the heat of war, others as the conflict was ending or after victory had been achieved. The emotions exhibited in these works range from despair to hope, from the bitterness of Sergei Prokofiev defeat to the exultation of victory. Born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891 War Symphonies It is perhaps telling that while no Died in Moscow, March 5, German or Italian symphonies composed during the war 1953 are remembered today, many from other countries remain impressive monuments. Aaron Copland’s Third, widely considered the “Great American Symphony,” was premiered in October 1946, after the Allied victory. (The work incorporates his Fanfare for the Common Man, composed for the war effort four years earlier.) Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, and a number of Bohuslav Martinů’s symphonies are among other enduring works that either openly or in more subtle ways engaged with the perilous times. Which brings us to the Soviet Union, where the relationship between the arts and politics was always complex and where the war extracted the largest number of causalities. The two leading Russian composers of the day both made important symphonic contributions: Dmitri Shostakovich with his Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad” (1941), and Sergei Prokofiev with his Fifth Symphony (1944). These works were composed in dire times, received triumphant premieres, made the rounds internationally led by eminent conductors, and were enthusiastically greeted by appreciative audiences. Americans embraced both symphonies by their Soviet allies. Shostakovich was hailed on the cover of Time magazine in August 1942 and Prokofiev appeared on the cover three years later, after the premiere of the Fifth Symphony in January 1945. 34

Prokofiev’s Path to the FifthFor all its success, Prokofiev’s path to his Fifth was an arduous one— personally, professionally, and most specifically with regard to how to write a substantive work in a genre that kept causing him some difficulty. After enjoying a privileged childhood, molded by parents eager to cultivate his obvious musical gifts, Prokofiev went on to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with leading Russian composers of the day, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Reinhold Glière. He won early fame with challenging Modernist scores that were unlike what most composers were writing in Russia during the 1910s. Then came the October Revolution of 1917. Like other prominent figures from similarly comfortable family backgrounds, including Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev left Russia. He made a long journey through Siberia, stopped off in Tokyo, and finally arrived in New York City in early September 1918. He would live in America, Paris, and other Western cities for nearly 20 years. In 1927 he returned for a visit to the Soviet Union and began to spend an increasing amount of time in his transformed native country. In the summer of 1936, with timing that boggles the mind today, he moved back permanently with his wife and their two young sons. He spent the rest of his life there, riding a roller coaster of official favor and stinging condemnation. He died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin. Prokofiev had composed his First Symphony, the “Classical,” in the summer of 1917, before leaving Russia. This brief work, which charmingly looks back to Haydn, remains a popular repertory item but hardly represented a bold new symphonic statement. His next symphony was disappointingly received at its Paris premiere in 1925 under Serge Koussevitzky. For his symphonies No. 3 (1928) and No. 4 (1930) Prokofiev recycled music he had previously written for opera and ballet scores and still seemed to be struggling with the genre, which may explain a comment he made about the Fifth: “I consider my work on this symphony very significant both because of the musical material put into it and because I returned to the symphonic form after a 16-year interval. The Fifth Symphony completes, as it were, a long period of my works.” A Triumphant Premiere Prokofiev wrote some of his most compelling music during the Second World War, including the opera War and Peace, the ballet Cinderella, the Second String Quartet, and three impressive piano sonatas. Given the grim circumstances in the Soviet 35

Union, the Fifth Symphony was born under relatively comfortable conditions during the summer of 1944, which Prokofiev spent in an artists’ colony set up by the Union of Composers at Ivanovo, some 160 miles from Moscow. (Shostakovich, Glière, Kabalevsky, and other prominent figures were also there.) After absolutely devastating years for the Soviet Union in their struggle against the Germans, things were beginning to look more hopeful with the news from Normandy and Poland. By the time Prokofiev conducted the premiere at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on January 13 there was real good news: The day before the Soviet Army had surged forward. The work was unveiled after intermission and as Time reported: It was exactly 9:30 p.m. A woman announcer in a black dress stepped to the platform. Said she: “In the name of the fatherland there will be a salute to the gallant warriors of the First Ukrainian front who have broken the defenses of the Germans—20 volleys of artillery from 224 guns.” The dark days of Stalingrad were over; the Polish offensive of January 1945 had begun. As she spoke, the first distant volley shook the hall. That evening was a complete triumph for Prokofiev, but also an ending of sorts. The concert proved to be the last time he conducted as just a few days later he had a serious fall, perhaps due to untreated high blood pressure, and was ill, although productive, for the remaining eight years of his life. A Closer Look Prokofiev excelled in many genres, producing chamber, choral, and keyboard music, impressive concertos, as well a distinguished quantity of dramatic music: operas, ballets, and film scores. As mentioned earlier, symphonies proved a challenge for him and may be one reason he recycled music he had written earlier for stage projects. The Fifth Symphony does not do so to nearly the extent of his previous two essays in the genre, but it does have moments that may remind listeners of War and Peace and uses some musical ideas originally conceived for his ballet Romeo and Juliet. The seriousness of the four-movement Symphony is immediately apparent from the spare opening theme of the Andante, played by flutes and bassoon. This builds to a grand statement of epic scope, one that returns in the finale. There is throughout the work a profusion of thematic material and Prokofiev’s prodigious lyrical gifts are fully evident—what sounds like a passionate love 36

Prokofiev composed his theme is followed by a nervous repeated-note motif, all Symphony No. 5 in 1944. of which are seamlessly integrated. The first movement The first Philadelphia Orchestra ends with a bold coda that pounds out the opening theme, performances of the Symphony now fully orchestrated and at full volume, suggestive of took place in January 1947, Prokofiev’s comment that he “conceived it as a symphony with George Szell on the of the greatness of the human spirit.” podium. The Philadelphians The following scherzo (Allegro marcato) has both light have performed the work many times, including on and more ominous elements, showing off the composer’s American and European tours. deft balletic writing as well as his affinity for the Its most recent appearance on grotesque. The following Adagio returns us to a lyrical, a subscription series was in even elegiac, tone with soaring themes and a funereal March 2018, with Lahav Shani middle section. Themes from the preceding movements conducting. are reviewed in the final Allegro giocoso, which begins with a slow introduction. The music has an inexorable The Orchestra recorded the Symphony three times: in quality of moving forward and reaches a marvelous coda. 1957 for CBS with Eugene After all the epic grandeur heard to this point, the texture Ormandy, in 1975 for RCA suddenly shifts to chamber music, with string soloists, with Ormandy, and in 1990 for percussion, piano, and harp taking frantic center stage Philips with Riccardo Muti. A before the thrilling final chord for the full orchestra. live recording from 2008 with —Christopher H. Gibbs Christoph Eschenbach is also available by digital download. Prokofiev’s score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam- tam, tambourine, triangle, woodblock), piano, harp, and strings. Performance time is approximately 50 minutes.

Program notes © 2019. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association. 37 Musical Terms

GENERAL TERMS instruments to muffle the (and sometimes others) Cadenza: A passage or tone of symphonies are usually section in a style of brilliant Op.: Abbreviation for opus, cast. The sections are improvisation, usually a term used to indicate exposition, development, inserted near the end of a the chronological position and recapitulation, the movement or composition of a composition within a last sometimes followed Chord: The simultaneous composer’s output. Opus by a coda. The exposition sounding of three or more numbers are not always is the introduction of tones reliable because they are the musical ideas, which Coda: A concluding often applied in the order are then “developed.” In section or passage added of publication rather than the recapitulation, the in order to confirm the composition. exposition is repeated with impression of finality Rondo: A form frequently modifications. Counterpoint: used in symphonies and Suite: During the Baroque The combination of concertos for the final period, an instrumental simultaneously sounding movement. It consists genre consisting of several musical lines of a main section that movements in the same Harmonic: Pertaining to alternates with a variety of key, some or all of which chords and to the theory contrasting sections (A-B- were based on the forms and practice of harmony A-C-A etc.). and styles of dance music Harmony: The Scherzo: Literally “a Tutti: All; full orchestra combination of joke.” Usually the third simultaneously sounded movement of symphonies THE SPEED OF MUSIC musical notes to produce and quartets that was (Tempo) chords and chord introduced by Beethoven Adagio: Leisurely, slow progressions to replace the minuet. The Allegro: Bright, fast Legato: Smooth, even, scherzo is followed by a Andante: Walking speed without any break between gentler section called a trio, Giocoso: Humorous notes after which the scherzo is Larghetto: A slow tempo Meter: The symmetrical repeated. Its characteristics Marcato: Accented, grouping of musical are a rapid tempo in triple stressed rhythms time, vigorous rhythm, and Tremolando: Quivering, Modernism: A humorous contrasts. Also trembling, rippling consequence of the an instrumental piece of fundamental conviction a light, piquant, humorous TEMPO MODIFIERS among successive character. Ma non troppo: But not generations of composers Sonata: An instrumental too much since 1900 that the means composition in three or of musical expression in four extended movements the 20th century must be contrasted in theme, adequate to the unique and tempo, and mood, usually radical character of the age for a solo instrument Mute: A mechanical Sonata form: The form in device used on musical which the first movements 38 Tickets & Patron Services

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