Join us on Sunday, August 16 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, August 17 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you a program from the 2025/2026 season. Principal guest conductor Marin Alsop leads Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 and a new work by Iryna Aleksiychuk, and pianist Haochen Zhang is featured in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
The concert opens with Go where the wind takes you…, an extraordinary recent piece by Ukrainian composer Iryna Aleksiychuk that offers hope to those living through war and troubled times. Not long after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Marin Alsop asked Aleksiychuk to write a work for her fellowship supporting women conductors. In accepting the commission, the composer took inspiration from a poem written by Olena Stepanenko, a survivor of the brutal occupation of the Ukrainian town of Bucha in the first months of the war. As the work opens, the poet is heard reading the brief verse in Ukrainian. It translates: “You are a wall, a memory, complete, indestructible, scarred with the names of the living and the dead…” It concludes, “Sister, go where the wind takes you. There is nothing you cannot overcome.” From this recording, the music emerges organically – first with barely audible string and vibraphone effects. The music grows toward a defiant and emphatic close. As Marin Alsop noted to the concert audience, “music like this reminds us of how important and powerful music and art are to humanity, because they unite us, they bring us together, and they’re nonpartisan.”
Pianist Haochen Zhang, the winner of the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition and a Philadelphia favorite, returns to perform the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff. It’s music with a very close connection to Philadelphia, as the composer wrote it with this orchestra in mind, and was the soloist with the Philadelphians and conductor Leopold Stokowski in its 1934 premiere. Rachmaninoff was not the first composer to feel an attraction to Paganini’s famous Caprice in A minor. It’s a perfect basis for variations, and in fact the original Paganini work is itself a set of variations. Rachmaninoff had already written substantial sets of variations for solo piano based on themes he found in works by Chopin and Corelli, so the Paganini Rhapsody seems to have posed no special challenges in terms of inspiration. And ever since its premiere, it has been a favorite of pianists and audiences everywhere. “To me, it's like 24 jewels on a crown. Each variation is just a very brilliant jewel for me,” Haochen Zhang says of the Paganini Rhapsody, adding that while Rachmaninoff “did very distinct things with each variation, he made it very cohesive.”
The program concludes with Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major — which, to a great degree, was inspired by an earlier work in the same key by Franz Schubert. More than a decade after Schubert’s death, Schumann rediscovered the score of his “Great” C major symphony. Today it is one of the most revered of all symphonies in the literature, but in 1838 no one knew of its existence. Schumann was deeply impressed by the score and arranged for his friend Felix Mendelssohn to conduct its premiere. Five years later Schumann, who suffered from episodes of severe depression throughout his life, was emerging from one especially difficult and protracted period when he heard another performance of Schubert’s great final symphony. This inspired Schumann to begin his own symphony in C major, the one we know as his Second. Conductor Marin Alsop comments that composing could bring Schumann out of depression, drawing a parallel to with the continuing relevance of this music: “Schumann was a troubled soul. We live in troubled times, and we live in a moment that's filled with doubt… and I think in some ways, for all of us who make music, it is a refuge for us in this moment in time, and we want to share it with people.”
PROGRAM:
Aleksiychuk: Go where the wind takes you…
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Schumann: Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Marin Alsop, conductor
Haochen Zhang, piano
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.
