Join us on Sunday, March 9 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1, and Monday, March 10 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 when The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you the first in a fresh new series of performances from the Orchestra’s 2024/2025 season. Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the orchestra in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 to open the program, with soloist Seong-Jin Cho. Then Yannick leads the Philadelphians in the magnificent Symphony No. 7 by Anton Bruckner.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in B-flat major was written to announce his arrival as a composer and piano virtuoso on the Viennese scene. While in his early 20s, Beethoven moved to Vienna and studied with Franz Joseph Haydn. His idol, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, had died by this time. But Beethoven had taken note of Mozart’s effective use of his own piano concertos as a vehicle to show off his gifts as a composer and solo performer. Beethoven resolved to do the same.
After the first performance of his concerto, he revised it based on the response of the audience — and with further performances, Beethoven kept on revising. “Usually when he composed his piano music, he did not really notate it properly,” Yannick explains. “There was always an element of improvisation to it.”
With all the revisions, it was more than a decade before the work was finally published. And that is how the first mature piano concerto Beethoven composed came to be known as his second piano concerto. In an interview during the broadcast, Nézet-Séguin notes the work’s “cheeky” quality, communicated by pianist Seong-Jin Cho in multiple playful interactions with the orchestra.
The culmination of this concert by The Philadelphia Orchestra is Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 — the first of this composer’s symphonies to meet with unqualified success. He had come late to composing symphonies, in his forties. For some time these weren’t especially successful with the public. After each disappointing premiere, well-meaning critics and friends felt free to make suggestions to “improve” the music. And Bruckner took many of those suggestions, creating what’s known as the “Bruckner Problem” for later generations. With multiple editions, which version of a given symphony should they honor?
But the Seventh marked a turning point. Thanks to the acclaim that greeted its premiere, it needed very little revision. Many of the trademarks of the earlier symphonies occur in the Seventh, but truly perfected: a spacious opening, with a majestic melody over hushed strings; a rhythmically forceful scherzo; a grand but not grandiose finale. And in the Seventh, there was a deeply moving slow movement, weighted with significance.
While composing the symphony, Bruckner had a premonition. His musical idol, Richard Wagner, was ill, and Bruckner felt sure Wagner would not last long. This thought inspired the main theme of the Adagio second movement, a yearning melody that truly lingers in the memory. The instrumentation of this movement also paid tribute with the use of four Wagner tubas — hybrids of horn and tuba that Wagner had commissioned for use in his operas. Bruckner’s Seventh marks their first use in a symphony. Wagner would survive another several months after Bruckner’s premonition, but when news of the master’s death arrived, Bruckner added one final tribute: a mournful chorale at the close of the Adagio, featuring the Wagner tubas. This was, as he wrote in the score, “in memory of the immortal and dearly beloved master who has departed this life.”
The broadcast features an illuminating conversation with music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
PROGRAM
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E major
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Seong-Jin Cho, piano
Listen to The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert broadcasts, every Sunday at 1 PM on WRTI 90.1, streaming at WRTI.org, on the WRTI mobile app, and on your favorite smart speaker. Listen again on Mondays at 7 PM on WRTI HD-2. Listen for up to two weeks after broadcast on WRTI Replay or at The Philadelphia Orchestra On Demand.
