Join us on Sunday, May 24 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, May 25 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you music by Samuel Barber, John Adams, and Gustav Mahler, in a concert from the 2025/2026 season.
The program opens with a brief and colorful fanfare by John Adams, one of the most celebrated of today’s composers, whose works for orchestra figure frequently on American orchestra programs. Short Ride in a Fast Machine is among the briefest Adams works, but contains all the shimmering orchestration and exhilaration of his larger-scale efforts. Conductor Dalia Stasevska calls it “irresistible.”
Violinist Augustin Hadelich is featured in another beloved American work, Barber’s Violin Concerto, which The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered in 1941. The German-born Hadelich “fell in love with this piece” when he moved to America for conservatory studies, he says, adding: “It’s just so unapologetically beautiful and lyrical.” Though Barber was only in his late 20s when he wrote the Concerto, he had enjoyed several notable successes. Most importantly, a historic event had cemented his reputation, when Arturo Toscanini conducted the Adagio for Strings in a live nationwide broadcast by the NBC Symphony. So the young composer faced high expectations for this Violin Concerto.
Barber didn’t disappoint, producing a lyrical masterpiece. In its first moments, as the solo violin unfurls a pensive, serene melody, we’re reminded that the composer was also a gifted singer. The slow movement keeps melody at the fore, as an elegiac opening oboe theme is met by a contrasting, rhapsodic utterance from the solo violin. The mood shifts in the spiky and short finale. It’s a perpetual-motion tour de force for the soloist that Hadelich calls “very thrilling.”
The program concludes with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G Major, composed in 1900. As he embarked on the Fourth Symphony, Mahler longed to create something simpler and shorter than his first three. His point of departure was a poem from a popular collection of folk verse. Titled “The Heavenly Life,” the poem presents paradise from a child’s viewpoint. Heaven, according to this vision, would be a place of constant play, delicious food, friendly saints, and simple joys.
Mahler worked backward, in a way. He had already composed a song on this text in 1892, and orchestrated it. Now his idea was to make it the finale of a symphony, and from this germ of an idea, the first three movements emerged. Elements of the song are foreshadowed in each of the preceding movements, so that the finale itself seems like an arrival, and an immensely satisfying one. In this performance, soprano Joélle Harvey makes her Philadelphia Orchestra debut, taking the part of the young child in the finale.
PROGRAM:
Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Barber: Violin Concerto, Op. 14
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Dalia Stasevska, conductor
Augustin Hadelich, violin
Joélle Harvey, soprano
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.
