Join us on Sunday, May 10 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, May 11 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program from the 2025/2026 season featuring the Fifth Symphony of Jean Sibelius, an orchestral suite from Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, and Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, with violinist María Dueñas. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on the podium.
In September 2021, Terence Blanchard made history as the first Black composer to have an opera staged at The Metropolitan Opera in New York. Already a famous jazz trumpeter and bandleader as well as the composer of influential film scores, Blanchard knew how to move gracefully among genres. He had penned his first opera several years earlier; indeed, opera was a key musical influence from his childhood, as his father was an amateur singer who adored the operas of Giacomo Puccini.
In 2013 the Opera Theatre of St. Louis premiered Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, and a few years later, they introduced Fire Shut Up In My Bones. Based on a memoir by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, the opera is a dramatic and turbulent coming-of-age story. When it reached the Met Opera in 2021, Yannick Nézet-Séguin was on the podium. That production’s success led Yannick and The Philadelphia Orchestra to commission an orchestral suite from the opera, so that Blanchard’s music could live in the concert hall as well as the opera house. They premiered the suite in 2024.
At the center of this concert is the Symphonie espagnole by Édouard Lalo, a French composer with significant Spanish heritage who tapped into a contemporary fascination in France for Spanish melodies and rhythms. One of the leading violin virtuosos of the time was a Spaniard, Pablo de Sarasate, whom Lalo met in the 1870s. They became fast friends, and Lalo wrote this Symphonie espagnole for Sarasate. The work is a hybrid of concerto, symphony, and suite, stretching traditional definitions of each of these forms and offering a delightful and exuberant listening experience. The performance features a young Spanish virtuoso with a rising reputation, violinist María Dueñas, who won the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in 2021 performing this very piece.
The concert concludes with the Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82, by Jean Sibelius, who endured many struggles while composing the work. At the time he was already revered in his native Finland for having brought international attention to the territory’s quest for independence from Russia. Indeed, this symphony was commissioned by the new Finnish government to be premiered on the composer’s 50th birthday, which had been declared a holiday.
Putting aside the pressure of producing a work that would justify such an occasion, the composer also endured much personal suffering as he composed, including health problems and a traumatic flight from Russian troops. But the work was completed on schedule, and Sibelius himself conducted the premiere in December 1915. Almost immediately afterward, he withdrew the symphony and significantly revised it — twice. After leading the third version in concert in 1919, even the self-critical Sibelius could find nothing more he wanted to change.
PROGRAM:
Blanchard: Orchestral Suite from Fire Shut Up In My Bones
Lalo: Symphonie espagnole
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Maria Duenas, 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.
