Join us on Sunday, April 26 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, April 27 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program from the 2025/2026 season featuring Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and a Concerto for Orchestra tailored to The Philadelphia Orchestra by American composer Jennifer Higdon. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on the podium, and violinist Lisa Batiashvili is featured.
The program opens with one of the most beloved of all violin concertos: the Concerto in D Minor by Jean Sibelius. If this Finnish master had been able to follow his first choice of career, we might be significantly poorer for the loss of much glorious music. As a youngster he dreamed of a career as a violin virtuoso. He studied violin at the Helsinki Conservatory, with composition as a fallback. Eventually, after a failed audition for a violin position with the Vienna Philharmonic, Sibelius realized composition was the better path for him.
About a decade later, he began sketching out ideas for his idiosyncratic and expansive violin concerto. There’s a sense throughout the work that Sibelius is painting great sonorous landscapes. And it absolutely requires the virtuosic abilities that Sibelius had once aspired to, plus a rich artistic imagination — which soloist Lisa Batiashvili definitely possesses — to make the most of the composer’s musical narrative.
The centerpiece of this concert is another concerto, but one for the full orchestra. Jennifer Higdon wrote it in 2001 for the musicians of The Philadelphia Orchestra, who have revived it multiple times. It’s part of a lineage of concertos that show off the virtuosity of orchestral players, rather than a single soloist. That line goes back to the Concerto for Orchestra written in 1945 by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.
Yannick calls Higdon’s concerto “groundbreaking” not just for the Philadelphians, but for American orchestral music generally, as ensembles around the country have eagerly performed the work. “I think we're going to remember this piece as being somewhat the start of a new era,” he says. In conceiving the piece, Higdon tailored sections and solos to the specific characteristics of individual orchestra members, many of whom she knew well as colleagues and friends. “To hear The Philadelphia Orchestra play it, there's just nothing that compares, because they know this piece on a DNA level,” Higdon says. “I got a lot of requests from the players about what they wanted for their own solos. So it truly is the inspiration of the musicians of The Philadelphia Orchestra that inspired each step along the way in the writing process.”
This performance concludes with Francesca da Rimini, a dramatic symphonic poem by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He took as his subject the story of Francesca da Rimini, a condemned figure from Dante’s Inferno. The poet, imagining a trip through hell, meets the condemned heroine Francesca, who tells him of the adulterous love affair that led to her damnation. Francesca and her lover, Paolo, were murdered by her husband. In hell they remain together, but their punishment is to be tossed in an eternal storm, never having the peace to enjoy their union. In the orchestral score, Tchaikovsky quoted a passage from Dante’s retelling of the doom of the adulterous lovers Francesca and Paolo. Francesca says to the poet: “there is no greater sorrow than to remember happy days in times of misery.”
PROGRAM:
Sibelius: Violin Concerto in d minor
Higdon: Concerto for Orchestra
Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Lisa Batiashvili, 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.
