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Fabio Luisi leads the 'Carmina Burana;' Emanuel Ax plays Mozart

Pianist Emanuel Ax
Lisa Marie Mazzucco
Pianist Emanuel Ax

Join us on Sunday, July 28 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, July 29 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you Carl Orff’s rousing and colorful Carmina Burana, with three Philadelphia-based choirs and three sterling soloists joining the fun. In the first half of the concert, Emanuel Ax offers the Piano Concerto in C Major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Fabio Luisi, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, leads the program.

The mature piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart raised the concerto form to a height not heard before. Their enduring greatness stems from many factors, but perhaps the overarching one is that Mozart composed so masterfully in so many different genres of music. Keyboard works, symphonies, sacred music, chamber music, and opera all flowed easily from his pen. Especially, Mozart’s experience composing for the stage seems to have influenced many of his instrumental works, lending them by turns dramatic tension, comic joy, and an overall humanity that seem directly tied to his operas. His mature piano concertos exemplify this connection, and in the Concerto No. 25 there is also a symphonic cast to the writing that may relate to the fact that he was composing his “Prague” Symphony at the same time. In his performance of this concerto, Emanuel Ax plays on an ergonomically curved keyboard that brings the extreme ends of the piano’s range closer to the performer. The design is by the late architect Rafael Vinoly, a dedicated amateur pianist who also designed the uniquely curved hall that serves as the orchestra’s home. The piano was built by master piano maker Chris Maene.

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Conductor Fabio Luisi says that Carl Orff's greatest contribution was not as a composer, but as an innovative music educator

To close the program, Fabio Luisi conducts a grand choral extravaganza: Carmina Burana, the most famous work by 20th-century German composer Carl Orff. The composer based this work on a collection of poetry from the 11th and 12th centuries, found at a Benedictine monastery in Germany. The poems, which are mostly in Latin but also in medieval German and French, were written by monks and students. And while they were discovered in a religious community, they are most certainly not devotional in nature. Instead they are intensely secular: satirical, irreverent, even downright bawdy. In 1935, Orff selected about two dozen of these poems and loosely organized them on themes of love, lust, carousing in the tavern, and springtime. As a frame, he opened and closed his libretto with the poem “O Fortuna,” a lament about the inescapable power of fate over human lives.

With his libretto in hand, Orff set about writing a colorful, rhythmic, and exciting score for three vocal soloists, two choruses, and a large orchestra. It’s a tour de force for them all, with extremes of range, tempo, and expression. And it has always been a hit with audiences. In conversation with WRTI’s Alex Ariff, Fabio Luisi notes that this familiar score is made more appealing by the fact that “except for technology, life in the Middle Ages was not much different than life today. We have the same issues. We love, we drink, we eat, we have fun. We are sad sometimes. And this is what (the piece) is about.” Featured in this performance are three local choirs – the Mendelssohn Chorus, the Philadelphia Girls’ Choir, and the Philadelphia Boys Choir – as well as three vocal soloists, all making their Philadelphia Orchestra debuts: soprano Audrey Luna, tenor Sunnyboy Dladla, and baritone Sean Michael Plumb.

PROGRAM:

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503

Orff: Carmina Burana

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Fabio Luisi, conductor

Emanuel Ax, piano

Audrey Luna, soprano

Sunnyboy Dladla, tenor

Sean Michael Plumb, baritone

Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia

Philadelphia Boys' Choir

Philadelphia Girls' Choir

WRTI PRODUCTION TEAM:

Melinda Whiting: Host

Alex Ariff: Senior Producer

Joseph Patti: 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. 

Melinda has worked in radio for decades, hosting and producing classical music and arts news. An award-winning broadcaster, she has created and hosted classical music programs and reported for NPR, WQXR—New York, WHYY–Philadelphia, and American Public Media. WRTI listeners may remember her years hosting classical music for WFLN and WHYY.