Join us on Sunday, Oct. 11 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you an eclectic program of works chosen by the musicians, including Mozart, Bartok, Hindemith, Caroline Shaw, and Tan Dun. Throughout the concert, musicians speak from the stage about the works they’ll play, led by Naomi Woo, Assistant Conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra.
The concert opens with the Overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1790 opera, Così fan tutte. Then we’ll hear an exciting piece by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun. It’s a double bass concerto called Wolf Totem, reflecting the composer’s abiding interest in the environment and in disappearing cultures — in this case, the Mongols and the wolves they hold sacred.
This concerto features Joseph Conyers, The Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal double bass, as soloist. He notes that the piece opens with the solo double bass in tandem with the rest of the double bass section in six parts: “I love that, because while you could say I'm the leader of the pack, it's more about being part of the pack,” Conyers says. This fascinating music also “brings those fantastic qualities out of the instrument as a soulful instrument,” he adds. And it ends with a galloping episode — an audience-pleasing conclusion “that has everybody pretty happy by the end.”
After intermission we’ll hear an Entr’acte for Strings, written by the youngest composer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Caroline Shaw received that accolade in 2013 when she was 30, for a piece she wrote for her own vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth. Shaw is a violinist as well as a vocalist, and two years earlier, she penned an Entr’acte for string quartet. We’ll hear her arrangement of the work for string orchestra.
The program continues with Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, a favorite of both musicians and audiences. In the years before the First World War, Bartók traveled throughout the small villages of his native Hungary and adjacent regions like Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, in search of authentic folk tunes. His quest produced countless volumes of meticulously transcribed tunes, and thousands of field recordings. In the process, Bartók so thoroughly absorbed these folk traditions that many of his own original themes could easily be mistaken for actual folk songs. But he also made a point of arranging folk songs for varied combinations of instruments, to revive interest in the tunes and traditions he treasured.
This Musicians’ Choice concert concludes with a work that showcases the virtuosity of The Philadelphia Orchestra as a whole: Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.
Hindemith had a thriving career in Germany during the first decades of the 20th century. But like so many other artists, his politics did not please the Nazi regime, and by 1940, he became part of the tide of European composers flooding into America. In his luggage were sketches for an abandoned ballet based on tunes by Carl Maria von Weber, whom Hindemith greatly admired. From Weber’s themes, Hindemith created his “symphonic metamorphosis.” As principal tuba Carol Jantsch comments during this concert: "Hindemith writes as if every single person on stage has serious chops, and this is very much the case here. And I can't think of a better way to feature all of my fabulous colleagues onstage than playing a piece like this for all of you today."
PROGRAM:
Mozart: Suite from Così fan tutte
Tan Dun: Wolf Totem
Shaw: Entr’acte for Strings
Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances
Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Naomi Woo, conductor
Joseph Conyers, double bass
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).
