Join us on Sunday, June 22 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, June 23 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program of Brahms and Louise Farrenc, plus a new work by Philadelphia native Julia Wolfe. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s music and artistic director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is on the podium, and welcomes his friend and frequent collaborator, pianist Hélène Grimaud, as soloist.
A celebratory new piece by the Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary composer Julia Wolfe opens the program. A native of Philadelphia, she is co-founder of the modern music collective Bang on a Can.
She chose the name Pretty for this Philadelphia Orchestra co-commission after discovering that in Old English, the word had different connotations than we think of today. Back then, “pretty” meant “cunning, crafty, or clever.” And this rambunctious music definitely fits that description. The composer describes the work as “a raucous celebration, embracing the grit of folk fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll.”
This concert also features a symphony by Louise Farrenc, a French composer of the Romantic era whose music has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Farrenc was best known in her own time as a piano virtuoso. In the Romantic era, performing as a soloist was one of just a few musical paths women could pursue as a profession. They could also teach, privately, but no woman held a prominent faculty position at the revered Paris Conservatory until Farrenc became a professor of piano there in 1842.
It was also acceptable in those times for a woman to compose piano pieces, chamber works, and songs. But women had little incentive or encouragement to compose larger works like symphonies. Conductors and orchestras had no interest in works by women. And few composers want to pour passion and effort into a major work that will never be performed. Farrenc was one of those few, at least for a time. She penned two orchestral overtures, and three symphonies of striking assurance and weight, beginning with her Symphony No. 1 in C Minor from 1841.
This concert closes with what Nézet-Séguin calls a “revolutionary” work by Johannes Brahms: the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15. Pianist Hélène Grimaud is featured in this work of symphonic proportions, whose genesis was bound up in the young composer’s long-running aim to follow the great symphonies of Beethoven with a worthy symphony of his own. Brahms conceived this music first as a sonata for two pianos. He soon decided to orchestrate it as a symphony, but struggled. Then, a solution came to him in a dream, which he recounted in a letter to his friend Clara Schumann not long before the death of his mentor and her husband, Robert Schumann. As he wrote, Brahms dreamed that “I had used my unfortunate symphony for a piano concerto and was performing it…terribly difficult and grand. I was completely delighted!”
PROGRAM:
Wolfe: Pretty
Farrenc: Symphony No. 1 in C minor
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Hélène Grimaud, piano
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.