Join us on Sunday, April 6 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, April 7 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a France-focused program from the 2024/2025 season featuring Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz, and the Cello Concerto written in 2008 by Guillaume Connesson, featuring soloist Gautier Capuçon. Stéphane Denève, music director of the Saint Louis Symphony, conducts.
This all-French concert opens with music by Augusta Holmès, whose music has been neglected until recently. In the late 19th century, though, she was quite celebrated. Born of Irish parents living in Paris, she identified as French despite the very non-French given name of Augusta Mary Anne Holmès. (As an adult, she added an accent to her last name to ensure its French pronunciation.) A devoted student of César Franck, Holmès achieved notable successes, including a majestic cantata in five sections for chorus and orchestra called Ludus pro patria. Its second movement is for orchestra alone, with the title “La Nuit et l’Amour,” or “Night and Love.” This music, as well as other major works by Holmès, were often described approvingly in her time as “masculine.”
In 2008, Guillaume Connesson, one of France’s most acclaimed contemporary composers, wrote a Cello Concerto that received its U.S. premiere with this performance by Gautier Capuçon and the Philadelphians. The concerto is in five movements, organized broadly into two major sections. Besides the highly virtuosic cello part, there is quite a lot of innovative writing for percussion in this work, including a guiro, kalimba, stones, whip, and glass harmonica, among other sonorities. The concerto’s first movement, titled “Granitic,” is craggy and rhythmic, but with a lyrical cello line. This leads directly into a scherzo-like second movement, with the heading “Lively.” The third movement, “Heavenly,” presents a pastoral scene in which flutes and xylophone offer the sounds of birds and insects surrounding the meditative cello line. A Cadenza for solo cello follows, improvisatory in feeling, before the finale, which has the descriptive heading “Orgiastic.” Conductor Stéphane Denève, a major advocate for Connesson’s music, notes that the composer is “really continuing the great French tradition of lush harmonies of very sophisticated orchestration and a music that is very accessible yet extremely complex, extremely rich, extremely layered.”
The program concludes with the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz. At 23, a few years before setting the music down on paper, Berlioz went to the theater and fell desperately in love. The play was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Ophelia was portrayed by an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson. She immediately captured the composer’s heart, and when she appeared soon afterward in Romeo and Juliet, his impassioned obsession became almost overwhelming. He sent her love letters, which went unanswered. She left Paris in 1828 without meeting Berlioz. Now unable even to admire her from a distance in the theater, the composer poured his unrequited passions into a new, semi-autobiographical work. He called it “Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the life of an artist.” So that no one would mistake his intentions, he wrote a detailed scenario and gave each movement a title, too.
All five movements of the symphony contain a single recurrent theme, or idée fixe, which represents an idealized woman with whom the artist of the title has fallen deeply in love from a distance — just like Berlioz and his unattainable Harriet. This idée fixe is the primary theme of the first movement, “Daydreams, Passions.” In the second movement, “A Ball,” the artist glimpses his beloved among the whirling couples on the dance floor. The third movement takes the artist to a “Scene in the Country,” where he dreams of his beloved. His happy reverie is interrupted by a sudden worry: what if she should betray him? The pastoral scene ends with a distant rumble of thunder.
By this point, of course, the artist still has not met his beloved. Probably she has no idea he exists. But at the outset of the fourth movement, he believes he has been rejected. Despondent, he poisons himself with a large dose of opium. Instead of death, he experiences a terrifying hallucination. He dreams he has killed the woman he loves and is condemned. In this “March to the Scaffold” he witnesses his own execution — with a fleeting memory of the beloved before the guillotine falls. Still hallucinating in the fifth and final movement, the artist sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, a sinister gathering of mocking monsters, sorcerers, and ghosts. To his horror, the beloved appears and joins the dance, delighting the rest of the hideous assembly. The symphony ends with a seeming riot of orchestral color and brilliance — a perfect way to showcase The Philadelphia Orchestra in all its glorious color and virtuosity at the close of the season.
PROGRAM:
Holmès: “Night and Love,” from Ludus pro patria
Connesson: Cello Concerto
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Stéphane Denève, conductor
Gautier Capuçon, soloist
WRTI PRODUCTION TEAM:
Melinda Whiting: Host
Alex Ariff: Senior Producer
Susan Lewis: Consulting Producer
Joseph Patti: Broadcast Engineer
Listen to The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert broadcasts every Sunday at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1, streaming at WRTI.org, on the WRTI mobile app, and on your smart speaker. Listen again on Mondays at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2. Listen for up to two weeks after broadcast on WRTI Replay, accessible from the WRTI homepage (look for Listen to The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert On Demand).
