Join us on Sunday, October 18 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, October 19 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, selections from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, and the world premiere of a new work by John Adams. Principal guest conductor Marin Alsop is on the podium.
The John Adams premiere opens the concert. The composer has said of Marin Alsop: “She knows what I want. She understands it. She gets it.” The maestra has been introducing his music to audiences for decades — at the Cabrillo Festival of new music in California, during her long tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and at the Metropolitan Opera, where she made her debut in 2024 conducting the company’s first-ever production of Adams’s opera El Niño. This new work is called The Rock You Stand On. The title, according to the composer, evokes the qualities that he values most in Marin Alsop: “loyalty, determination, and devotion.” In turn, the conductor calls Adams “one of my all-time favorite composers. I think people will speak about John Adams as they speak about Beethoven, a few hundred years from now. And so it’s really a great honor and privilege to have a piece written by him for me.”
In fact this program continues with Beethoven: his Symphony No. 7 in A major. The work dates from 1813, at the height of his popular fame and success. It was also a moment of public celebration in much of Europe, as the tide turned in the Napoleonic wars. The symphony premiered alongside Wellington’s Victory, which Beethoven had written to commemorate a famous battle in which the Duke of Wellington soundly defeated Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte. In short, there was a triumphant spirit in the air, which the Seventh Symphony brilliantly captured.
The work met an ecstatic reception, and the second movement Allegretto was encored. There is a dancelike energy throughout the work, even in that solemn Allegretto. After the expansive slow introduction establishes a sense of expectation, each of the four movements is dominated by its very own compact, recurrent rhythmic figure, building a compelling drive even as Beethoven unfurls a seemingly limitless variety of ideas. There are inspired melodies and countermelodies, harmonic and dynamic surprises, and masterful touches of orchestration, all leading to an exuberant finale that Richard Wagner would later call “the apotheosis of the dance.”
To conclude the program, Marin Alsop has assembled selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s evening-length ballet Romeo and Juliet, which she terms “one of the great ballet scores of all time. It is just a phenomenal body of work.” And, she adds, “it captures the conflict and the drama and the tragedy and the suffering and the joy” of Shakespeare’s story. Prokofiev composed this classic ballet in 1935 for Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet. But before the score was complete, the Kirov dropped the project. Prokofiev sought another presenter without success. He salvaged the music he’d already written in orchestral suites and piano excerpts for use in concerts and recitals.
A staged premiere of the ballet finally took place in Czechoslovakia, and ballet companies have mounted Romeo and Juliet regularly ever since. But because the full score is about two and a half hours long, this marvelous music is most often heard in concert, via the composer’s three orchestral suites. We know this music primarily from those suites, but none of them present the music in the order of the story. For this concert performance, Marin Alsop has chosen scenes from throughout the score and offers them in dramatic sequence, from the opening portrait of the feuding families to the ultimate deaths of the lovers.
PROGRAM:
Adams The Rock You Stand On
Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92
Prokofiev Selections from Romeo and Juliet
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Marin Alsop, conductor
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).
