Join us on Sunday, July 6 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, July 7 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program of Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Gabriela Lena Frank from the 2024/2025 season. Marin Alsop makes her first appearance in Philadelphia as the Orchestra’s principal guest conductor, and the exciting young violinist Randall Goosby is featured.
It was in 1838 that Felix Mendelssohn first heard the melody that opens his Violin Concerto in E Major. It appeared fully formed in his mind, and he couldn’t shake the tune that is so well known to the world today. Slightly melancholy and very memorable, it “gave him no peace,” as he wrote to a friend. In fact, it haunted him for years. It was clear to Mendelssohn that this would be the beginning of a violin concerto, but it wasn’t until 1844 that he put pen to paper.
“It's a piece that I always enjoy particularly because of Mendelssohn’s fresh approach to the concerto form,” says Alsop. “The most special thing is the way it starts. It’s as though the piece has been going on and you just opened the living room door and happened upon it.” The famous melody that first inspired the composer appears immediately, introduced by the solo violin. This establishes a pattern: the violinist takes the lead in introducing thematic material throughout the concerto. Goosby is especially fond of this concerto; excerpts of his fascinating interview with producer Alex Ariff are available on WRTI’s YouTube channel.
A specific melody was also the inspiration for this concert’s concluding work, a magnificent set of variations by Johannes Brahms, who had an abiding interest in the music of previous centuries. Brahms could often be found studying old scores of Renaissance, Baroque and Classical masters. One day, one of his scholarly friends showed him a manuscript of an unpublished piece for winds that he believed to be by Haydn. Brahms took an immediate interest in a melody within that piece. Bearing the heading “St. Antoni Chorale,” it was a curious tune: just two phrases, each five measures long. Brahms jotted it down, thinking it might be a good basis for variations. A few years later, the little chorale sketch resurfaced on his desk, and he produced a stunningly inventive work in two forms.He called it “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” — but in more recent times, scholarship has established that the chorale was not, in fact, by Haydn. No one is sure of its origins.
The concert opens with an extraordinary world premiere by Gabriela Lena Frank. Picaflor: A Future Myth is the last work of Frank’s four-year tenure as The Philadelphia Orchestra’s composer-in-residence. Like much of Frank’s music, Picaflor was inspired by the mythology of her mother’s homeland, Peru. Frank writes that she is drawn to an ancient Peruvian concept of pachacuti, the belief that cataclysmic changes occur every several hundred years, ending one civilization and giving rise to another. Each cataclysm brings its own story of creation, or re-creation.
In writing Picaflor, Frank wondered what might happen if we imagined such a change taking place in the future rather than the past. Hence its subtitle, “A Future Myth.” In this piece she reimagines one very old pre-Incan creation myth, told in 10 musical episodes, about a prehistoric hummingbird (“picaflor” in Spanish) who sets re-creation in motion by tearing a hole in the sky with its beak. “With a little bit of sunfire in its beak, it flies down” to the dark and inhospitable surface of the Earth, said Frank in introducing the work to the audience. “With that sunfire it warms up the planet, and from that warmth comes Pachamama, the Mother Earth; comes other humans and creatures, culture, and civilization. From that spirit of curiosity and connection and courage, life is spawned.”
PROGRAM:
Frank: Picaflor: A Future Myth
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in e minor, Op. 64
Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Marin Alsop, conductor
Randall Goosby, 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.
