Join us on Sunday, Nov. 23 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, Nov. 24 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program of Classical and Neoclassical masterworks in the closing concert of the 2024/2025 season. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts, and the young British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason is the featured soloist.
Classical works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Bologne provide the concert’s bookends. Bologne, known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a central figure in Parisian high society in the 1770s and 1780s. The biracial son of an enslaved Caribbean mother and a plantation owner, he received an elite education in Paris and was renowned not only as a violinist, conductor, and composer, but as a champion swordsman, among other accomplishments. When the American envoy (and future U.S. president) John Adams was based in Paris, he wrote in his diary that Saint-Georges was “the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, running, dancing, and music.”
At around this time, Saint-Georges came into contact with Mozart, who visited Paris for most of the year 1778. The two even lived in the same house briefly, and it’s intriguing to imagine the interactions they might have had: Saint-Georges, the toast of Paris; and Mozart, a decade younger and struggling for recognition. In 1780, Saint-Georges wrote an opera, The Anonymous Lover. At the time, opera overtures generally consisted of three short movements. Essentially they were short symphonies, and the overture to this opera was in fact published two decades later as Saint-Georges’s Symphony No. 2.
One of Mozart’s most famous symphonies closes the program: the Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, known as the “Haffner” symphony. Mozart was feeling overcommitted in 1782 when he received a commission from a prominent Salzburg family, the Haffners. He had written a Serenade for this family a few years earlier, and felt he couldn’t turn down the opportunity, even though he was busy with other projects — not to mention preparing for his own wedding. Still, he dashed off the symphony in two weeks, adding a few extra movements for good measure. His hard work paid off several months later, when he had to produce a symphony in a hurry for a sold-out concert of his own music in Vienna. Mozart retooled the Haffner symphony, making changes to the orchestration and deleting the extra movements. In the audience was Emperor Joseph II, and Mozart took special pride in the monarch’s applause.
Music by Soviet composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich is at the center of the program. Prokofiev had a felicitous idea for his Symphony No. 1 in 1917, a moment of peril in Russia as its revolution approached. As he weathered this uncertain time in a small village outside St. Petersburg, Prokofiev distracted himself by composing a symphony for a small orchestra that Haydn would have recognized: pairs of winds, plus timpani and a small complement of strings. As Prokofiev later wrote: “It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day, he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of Symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the Classical style.” Prokofiev channeled that style beautifully in this work: the form is purely classical, the clarity and lyricism recall Mozart, and the humor would have made Haydn feel completely at home. Prokofiev soon left the Soviet Union, remaining away from his homeland for nearly two decades.
His younger contemporary, Shostakovich, however, spent his entire career in Soviet Russia — sometimes enjoying heady success, but also feeling the pressures of life under an authoritarian regime. Like many of his works, the Cello Concerto No. 1 betrays some of this angst from its very opening bars, with the insistent repetition of a four-note musical motto. “There's a certain kind of feeling of resistance, I think, that comes with this theme,” says British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist in this performance. ”It's very gripping, and intense as an experience, and it comes in lots of different forms. It opens at the sort of bottom of the cello, in a kind of intimate and sinister and sort of muted way.” Shostakovich wrote the work in 1959 for the great virtuoso Mstislav Rostropovich, who premiered it in October that year in Leningrad, and repeated it a month later here in Philadelphia, with Eugene Ormandy on the podium.
PROGRAM:
Bologne: Symphony No. 2 in D major
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 (“Classical”)
Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107
Mozart: Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385 (“Haffner”)
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, cello
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.
