Join us on Sunday, July 30 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, July 31 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you an encore program of works by Sibelius, Ravel, and John Adams from the 2022/2023 season.
The Philadelphia Orchestra welcomes guest conductor Roderick Cox in his debut, leading the Suite No. 2 from Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis and Chloe, as well as a symphony based on American composer John Adams’ opera Dr. Atomic. In between, Augustin Hadelich plays the iconic Violin Concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius.
Like the new blockbuster film Oppenheimer, the 2005 opera Dr. Atomic is focused on a celebrated physicist who led the first successful test firing of a nuclear bomb in 1945. J. Robert Oppenheimer headed the team of scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that prepared and carried out the test. The opera examines this fateful detonation through the eyes of Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, their Native American maid, Pasqualita, and others directly involved with the Manhattan Project. Two years after Dr. Atomic’s premiere, John Adams recast some of its music as a purely orchestral work: his Dr. Atomic Symphony.
If Sibelius had been able to follow his first choice of career, we might lack much glorious music by this remarkable composer. As a youngster he dreamed of becoming a violin virtuoso. His first dated composition, at 10 years of age, was for the violin, but he didn’t have formal violin instruction until his teenage years — very late for a musician with professional aspirations. Sibelius studied violin at the Helsinki Conservatory, with composition as a fallback. Eventually, after a failed audition to join the Vienna Philharmonic, he realized composition would be his path.
About a decade later, he began sketching out ideas for his idiosyncratic and expansive violin concerto, which absolutely requires the virtuosic abilities that Sibelius had once aspired to, plus a rich artistic imagination. As Augustin Hadelich notes in his conversation with WRTI producer Susan Lewis, in this endlessly inventive concerto the listener senses that Sibelius is painting great sonorous landscapes.
Ravel’s ballet Daphnis and Chloe was one of the first commissions of the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballet Russes, based in Paris. For 20 years, from 1909 until 1929, Diaghilev’s dance company exerted enormous cultural influence. He retained superbly gifted dancers and choreographers, groundbreaking young visual artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso as designers, and composers who were at the leading edge of contemporary music, like Igor Stravinsky and Manuel da Falla. In 1909, Diaghilev asked Ravel for a ballet on a pastoral scenario inspired by Classical Greek antiquity, about the love between a goatherd and a shepherdess. The idea captivated Ravel, and he entered into enthusiastic discussions with the choreographer and designer.
But if Diaghilev thought he would have a finished ballet score in short order, they didn’t know Maurice Ravel. A fastidious craftsman, Ravel focused on every detail of what would ultimately be an hourlong score of exhilarating color and passion that he would describe as a “choreographic symphony.” As Ravel perfected his musical vision, the frustrated Diaghilev postponed the premiere several times. Finally, the premiere of Daphnis and Chloe took place in 1912. Conductors quickly noticed the lush glories of Ravel’s score, and he extracted two concert suites from the larger ballet to give the music an extended life. The second suite, heard in this performance, consists of the ballet’s final scene, which begins at dawn and culminates in a thrilling Bacchanal.
PROGRAM:
Adams: Dr. Atomic Symphony
Sibelius: Violin Concerto in d minor
Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Roderick Cox, conductor
Augustin Hadelich, violin
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.
