Join us on Sunday, Oct. 4 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, Oct. 5 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you film music by John Williams, Copland’s Symphony No. 3 incorporating the Fanfare for the Common Man, and a recent violin concerto by Matthias Pintscher, who also conducts the program. Leila Josefowicz, a renowned violinist with strong Philadelphia connections, is featured.
The concert opens with music by John Williams, an American master of music for the movies. He was the driving force behind the re-emergence of symphonic film scores in the 1970s. In '77, Williams penned the score for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a plot revolving around a surge in UFO sightings. A fascinating aspect of this groundbreaking film is the role that music plays in the plot. The aliens observed in the story try to establish communication with the Earth’s inhabitants through music. They play a five-note musical theme as a greeting, and this motive is woven throughout Williams’s score. “I love the whole opening with all these distorted harmonies,” notes Pintscher. “There's a creepy cluster growing out of that entire string section basically reaching out for you. It's just very captivating music.”
At the center of the program is a work of Pintscher’s own, written specifically for his close friend, violinist Leila Josefowicz. Assonanza began as a piece for violin solo, composed during the COVID shutdown. Later, the two artists decided it could be expanded into a larger work with orchestra. Josefowicz, who is known for her advocacy and expertise in music by living composers, feels a special connection to Pintscher’s music. “His music reflects this sensitivity and this kind of inner world, this complexity, but also the very beautiful sonorities and textures,” she notes. “It's sort of a magical world to bring people into.” Josefowicz has a long history with Philadelphia audiences, having made her debut with this orchestra back in 1992, when she was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. Some of her classmates from that time are in The Philadelphia Orchestra today, giving special resonance to this performance.
This concert concludes with the Symphony No. 3 by Aaron Copland, with its finale centered around the famous Fanfare for the Common Man. In the late 1930s, Copland was already one of the leading figures on the American musical scene. But he was troubled by the growing distance between composers and audiences. As he wrote in 1941, “It seemed to me that composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.” Copland made a personal resolution: “I felt it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” The fruits of this mindset were pieces that define Copland’s unique voice for us today: works like the Fanfare, Lincoln Portrait, Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring.
By 1944, Copland was ready to return to writing pure music without an implied narrative, and began to sketch his Third Symphony, in which the Fanfare would figure prominently. This brief piece was well known to American audiences by 1946, the year of the symphony’s premiere. Although the fanfare theme is not openly stated until the fourth movement, it is the basis for many of the motives that define the first three movements, so that when we finally hear it as the finale begins, we feel a sense of arrival. In Pintscher’s words, “It's a very powerful moment. It's beautiful how the brass is delivering these expansive, lush, noble lines and motifs and fanfares. It's not glorious. It's just very introspective music — very heartfelt. It's very pure.”
PROGRAM:
Williams: Suite from Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Pintscher: Assonanza
Copland: Symphony No. 3
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Matthias Pintscher, conductor
Leila Josefowicz, violin
WRTI PRODUCTION TEAM:
Melinda Whiting: Host
Alex Ariff: Senior Producer
Tyler McClure: Broadcast Engineer
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, accessible from the WRTI homepage (look for Listen to The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert On Demand).
