Resonance & Renewal Concert Info
Program Notes
Pre-Concert Video
NOTES FROM THE CONDUCTOR, TODD CRAVEN
Our concert this evening, Resonance and Renewal, takes place on September 12, a day that invites reflection on the courage, sacrifice, and service of those who answer the call in moments of crisis. It is fitting that we begin our season with Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout, a work inspired by the spontaneous expressions of gratitude offered to frontline workers during the pandemic. Filled with energy, optimism, and a spirit of community, the music celebrates the resilience that emerges when people come together in support of one another. In that sense, it serves as a powerful opening to an evening centered on hope, perseverance, and renewal.
The theme of Resonance and Renewal continues throughout the evening in two remarkable works that offer different perspectives on resilience and transformation.
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor is music of great drama and humanity. Even amid moments of tension and uncertainty, Mozart continually finds beauty and light, reminding us that renewal often begins with reflection.
Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 is a work I return to often. I hear in it the sounds of nature, a sense of perseverance, and ultimately an unmistakable feeling of hope. From its quiet beginnings, the music grows into something powerful and uplifting, suggesting that renewal is not a single moment, but a journey.
Together, these works invite us to reflect on the enduring strength of the human spirit and the possibility of growth, healing, and renewal in our own lives.
Seven O’Clock Shout
Valerie Coleman
Born: January 3, 1979, Louisville
Composed: 2020
Premiered: June 6, 2020, performed by socially distanced members of the Philadelphia Orchestra; live concert hall premiere at Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala on October 6, 2021
Approximate length: 6 mins
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 1 oboe, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, claves, cowbell, cymbals, marimba, suspended cymbal, vibraphone, whistle), harp, strings
Seven O’Clock Shout is an anthem inspired by the tireless frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brings people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes. The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon human kind, and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives, while nature is transforming and healing herself during a time of self-isolation.
[Orchestras were found it challenging to perform during the pandemic, either resorting to virtual performances, where individual musicians recorded their parts and someone combined all the video and audio files, or in socially distanced settings.] It was suggested that a short work for a debut by multi-track recording could account for the ensemble performing together as if they were in the same room. One of the devices used to address this is the usage of ostinato, a rhythmic motif that repeats itself to generate forward motion and, in this case, groove. The ostinato patterns here are laid down by the bass section, allowing the English horn and strings to float over it, gradually building up to that moment at 7pm, when cheers, claps, clangings of pots and pans, and shouts ring through the air of cities around the world! The trumpets drive an infectious rhythm, layered with a traditional son clave rhythm, while solo trombone boldly rings out an anthem within a traditional African call and response style. The entire orchestra ‘shouts’ back in response and the entire ensemble rallies into an anthem that embodies the struggles and triumph of humanity. The work ends in a proud anthem moment where we all come together with grateful hearts to acknowledge that we have survived yet another day.
To me, Seven O’Clock Shout is a declaration of our survival. It is something that allows us our agency to take back the kindness that is in our hearts and the emotions that cause us such turmoil. . . We cheer on the essential workers with a primal and fierce urgency to let them know that we stand with them and each other.
Program note by the composer
Click here to watch a video of the video-concert premiere
Click here for a standard orchestral performance
Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg
Died: December 5, 1791, Vienna
Composed: 1785, Vienna
Premiered: February 11, 1785, Vienna, with the composer as soloist
Approximate length: 30 mins
Instrumentation: 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
At age 25, Mozart took a courageous professional step and decided to try to “make it” as a freelance artist. At this time, most musicians and composers relied on the patronage of churches or nobility, essentially working as servants in royal households. Mozart was initially successful in his new venture, performing as a pianist and chamber musician, composing and producing operas. He also established a series of subscription concerts in Vienna to showcase his works, and he composed fifteen of his twenty-one piano concertos for these concerts. By serving as his own producer and soloist, Mozart not only provided himself with an environment to promote his compositions, but he also elevated the concerto from a form of light entertainment to a substantial musical undertaking comparable to the symphonies of the time.
Mozart started working on his twentieth piano concerto in mid-January, 1785, for a performance on February 11. As with many of his pieces, he finished it right before the performance; in fact, the orchestra didn’t have a chance to rehearse the last movement. Mozart’s father wrote to Mozart’s sister: “The work was still being copied out when we arrived and your brother had not had time to play through the rondo because he had to supervise the copying.’’
At that time, composers usually wrote music in major keys, with the intention of providing lighthearted entertainment. However, Mozart wrote this piece in the unusual key of D minor, the same key as his requiem and Don Giovanni. It was a key he and other composers had come to associate with fate and death, inspiring a piece that was more brooding and temperamental than any concerto up to this time. This foreboding key empowered Mozart to explore darkness and drama in his music and further open the door to the Romantic era.
The concerto is also marked by an unusual amount of contrast. Physicist Albert Einstein said of this piece that nowhere did Mozart create “stronger contrasts within a single work, contrasts among the three movements as well as within each movement.’’ It begins in quiet and menacing agitation, with the strings playing syncopated rhythms before the piano enters with an elegant melody. Orchestral interjections introduce a dialogue between piano and orchestra that sometimes feels like conflict. The slow second movement opens with a lyrical melody in a major key, though it has a melancholy undercurrent. It is structured as a rondo, with a theme that repeats several times separated by contrasting episodes. One such component is a stormy G minor episode. The piano opens the last movement, an energetic rondo, back in D minor. Mozart’s writing for the strings is fiery, almost foreshadowing the final scene of Don Giovanni. But the fates are thwarted in the concerto’s final measures, and the piece concludes in the joyful key of D Major.
Click here to watch a video of Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto.
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43
Sibelius, Jean
Born: December 8, 1865, Hämeenlinna, Finland
Died: September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland
Composed: 1901-1902, Rapallo, Italy
Premiered: March 8, 1902, Helsinki, with the composer conducting.
Approximate length: 43 mins
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, strings
Music donated by Marie Blauwkamp
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Finland was surging with patriotic fervor in defiance of its Russian occupiers. Finns were passionate about their homegrown culture—collecting traditional music and dance, exploring and retelling ancient Finnish legends, and reviving use of the Finnish language in everyday life. Artists and composers subtly joined this patriotic resistance by nurturing nationalism through their art. Composer Jean Sibelius was a leading figure in the movement for Finnish nationalism. His first symphonic compositions were patriotic tone poems, including the choral symphony Kullervo and pieces based on Finland’s national epic, Kalevala. His best known piece, Finlandia, was composed for a 1899 festival as the finale of a series of tableaux on themes of Finnish historical events. It was an instant success, bringing international attention to the composer and the cause of Finnish independence.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Sibelius was recognized in his homeland and throughout Europe as Finland’s leading composer. With his success came the opportunity to travel, allowing Sibelius to meet other musicians, hear new works, and conduct his own music across the continent. He spent the first half of 1901 in Italy, and he wrote most of Symphony No. 2 that spring, in a small villa in the hills near Genoa. Sibelius returned to Finland later that year and finished the work late in the fall, claiming, “my second symphony is a confession of the soul.”
In many of his symphonies, including his second, Sibelius takes a unique compositional approach. Instead of beginning the first movement with a few long melodies for later dissection and development, Sibelius opens his piece with a series of several little melodic fragments. He gradually interweaves these ideas into ever-longer phrases, particularly during a lengthy development section. At the end of the movement, the orchestra’s grand musical exploration gives way to the foundational yet small fragments, and the movement ends as quietly as it began.
The second movement, in D minor, opens with the timpani setting a rather ominous tone, which is taken up by an almost menacing “walking” pizzicato string bass part. Eventually the bassoon enter with a lonely melody. The symphony’s first conductor, Robert Kajanus, insisted that the Helsinki audiences had understood this movement as an overt expression of the political conflict then reigning over Finland. “The Andante,” he wrote, “strikes one as the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time to deprive the sun of its light and our flowers of their scent. . . . The Finale develops toward a triumphant conclusion intended to rouse in the listener a picture of lighter and confident prospects for the future.” However, Sibelius objected to this interpretation, preferring that no programmatic implications be attached to this work.
The third movement is a fast, fierce scherzo. One interpreter said, “The pastoral sunshine bathing the first movement’s opening is soon swept away by icy winds [in the scherzo]…. what one might take as a flurry of snow yields to a shepherd’s call on the oboe.” Here, frenzied strings are juxtaposed against a slower trio section featuring a bittersweet repeated-note melody for oboe. Both the scherzo and trio return, but the trio’s second appearance richly ushers in the finale, using the symphony’s opening ascending three note fragment to usher in its expansive melody, introduced by strings and brass. After an agitated transition, the lower strings have a repeated figure under the second main theme, begun by the solo oboe. A brief fanfare from the brass closes the exposition, and the development begins quietly. This section builds gradually towards an immense climax and a return of the opening musical themes. A return of the brass fanfare signals the beginning of the symphony’s coda. Eventually the entire brass section takes up a final, transformed version of this melody to close the symphony in triumph.
Click here to watch a video of Sibelius’s second symphony.
Notes by Amanda W. Dykhouse
