Join us on Sunday, May 25 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, May 26 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program of Brahms, Korngold, and Bent Sørensen from the 2024/2025 season, led by Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director Fabio Luisi.
Johannes Brahms revered the music of the past and carried its legacy forward in his own works. From the moment he set to work on his Fourth Symphony, he had a plan for its powerful finale. Using a fragment of music by Johann Sebastian Bach as a recurring theme, Brahms built a majestic edifice in the Baroque passacaglia form. It’s a fitting culmination not only to this moving, autumnal symphony, but to Brahms’s entire symphonic output. Leading up to this powerful finale, he conceived three movements with less obvious ties to the past — but with an inexorable momentum toward the finale.
As the centerpiece of the program, violinist Leonidas Kavakos is featured in music by a Viennese-born composer who became a household name through his scores for golden-age Hollywood films. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a celebrated musical prodigy in early 20th-century Vienna. By his late teens, he had staged a ballet and two highly praised operas. Korngold was still the toast of Vienna into his thirties, when he was approached to work on film projects in America. He began to shuttle back and forth across the Atlantic. Then, in 1938, the Nazis occupied Austria. Korngold, who was Jewish, shifted permanently to Los Angeles, focusing his energies on film. Out of this activity emerged his Violin Concerto, which draws heavily on Korngold’s music for the movies.
To open the concert, Fabio Luisi conducts a recent work by Bent Sørensen, the acclaimed Danish composer. Evening Land was inspired by two memories with strong visual and emotional resonance for the composer. One was a long-ago impression from his childhood: “I am 6 to 7 years old. I’m standing in my childhood home in a small town on Zealand (Denmark). I am looking out of the window, and there is a very special evening light over the fields... It is as if the world is infinite.” The composer’s second memory is much more recent, and yet somehow connected to the first. Standing on a balcony in New York and looking out over the busy city, he recalls that earlier experience: “The vision from more than 50 years ago — the vision of quiet — mixed with the new vision of flashes of light and bustling activity.” Evening Land emerged from these two visions.
PROGRAM:
Sørensen: Evening Land
Korngold: Violin Concerto
Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E Minor
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Fabio Luisi, conductor
Leonidas Kavakos, violin
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.
