Join us on Sunday, Nov. 16 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program of Stravinsky and Bartók, plus a new work by Canadian composer Barbara Assiginaak from the 2024/2025 season. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s music and artistic director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is on the podium, and the orchestra’s first associate concertmaster, Juliette Kang, is featured as soloist.
In 2021, Barbara Assiginaak, a member of the indigenous Anishinaabe tribe, wrote a brief work called As Long in Time as the River Flows for Montréal’s Orchestre Métropolitain. She imagined a canoe entering a calm river in the midst of thick fog under the light of the moon. As dawn arrives, the mist lifts, and creatures in and around the water awaken. This fascinating piece employs microtones, natural harmonics, and extended instrumental techniques to evoke the sounds of nature. Assiginaak is “absolutely masterful in this,” Yannick notes, calling for “techniques that are not so complicated and yet so effective, like brass players just blowing air in their instruments without a mouthpiece, blowing the air in the mouthpiece or just plainly singing… nobody in the audience knows where it comes from, and all of a sudden you hear nature.”
The centerpiece of this concert is Béla Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, a work rarely performed not because it is difficult to hear, but because it is fiendishly difficult to play, according to Yannick — for the orchestra and conductor as well as for the soloist. And yet, it seems to pose little problem for Juliette Kang, first associate concertmaster of The Philadelphia Orchestra, who learned the work as a teenager studying with the Hungarian violin virtuoso for whom it was written, Bartók’s friend Zoltán Székely. By that time Székely had been intimately familiar with this concerto for more than a half-century. Kang says the work draws on Bartók’s experience collecting folk melodies, but is also “harmonically so rich … and it’s jazzy.”
This performance concludes with The Firebird, a legendary ballet that Igor Stravinsky penned in 1910 for Serge Diaghilev’s famous Parisian dance troupe, the Ballets Russes. These days, The Firebird lives in the concert hall mainly in reduced form, as a suite — but in this performance, we’ll hear the complete score.
“It's a passion of mine to rediscover full ballets, especially when we know the excerpts so well,” says Yannick, noting the sense of discovery during lesser-known moments in the score “where there's an expectation of something happening — and all of a sudden, there is the piece that made it to the suite, which is famous.” There’s also the fun of following the story as it unfolds. Based on a Russian folktale, The Firebird follows a prince who chases a magical bird with gleaming, fiery feathers. By the time he catches her, he has wandered into an enchanted forest ruled by an evil demigod. The Firebird helps the prince kill this villain, free the petrified inhabitants of the forest, and win the love of a beautiful princess.
PROGRAM:
Assiginaak: As Long in Time as the River Flows
Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 2
Stravinsky: The Firebird
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Juliette Kang, 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.