When violinist Augustin Hadelich made his NWS debut in 2018, South Florida Classical Review hailed him “a virtuoso of the first order.” Hadelich continues to take the world by storm and returns to perform Jean Sibelius’ Concerto—an unforgettable work of brilliance. Johannes Brahms, troubled by Ludwig van Beethoven’s shadow, often lamented “the footsteps of a giant” behind him. With the nickname “Beethoven’s 10th,” Brahms’ first foray into the symphonic genre ultimately proved a masterpiece all his own. The concert opens with the vibrant energy pulsing through Julia Perry’s A Short Piece for Orchestra. 

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Program

Julia Perry

A Short Piece for Orchestra (1952)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

After studying composition and conducting at Westminster Choir College, Julia Perry began to make a name for herself in the early 1950s by writing music that drew on spirituals and other African American traditions. During the first of several European residencies, she studied with the French teacher who shaped so many great American careers, Nadia Boulanger, who helped introduce an international perspective that filtered into Perry’s later concert music. That sound is on display in A Short Piece for Orchestra, originally titled Study for Orchestra when the New York Philharmonic premiered it in 1965. An archival recording survives from that performance conducted by William Steinberg; it is a marvel to hear Perry’s explosive and elemental gestures played by one of the great orchestras of her time, rendering a modernist sound that was not far removed from the edgy scores Bernard Hermann created for Hitchcock’s iconic films in the same era. Perry suffered a series of strokes in her forties and died at 55, leaving us with only a sliver of the music we might have hoped to receive from this underrecognized talent of mid-century American music.

Jean Sibelius

Concerto in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 47 (1903-04; revised 1905)
Approximate duration: 31 minutes

When people living in what is now Finland were just starting to coalesce around a language, culture and shared dream of political independence from Russia, Jean Sibelius arose as the musical embodiment of those nationalist ideals. The works he composed at the turn of the 20th century, including Finlandia and his first two symphonies made him a folk hero and a rising international star.

Sibelius first mentioned an idea for the opening of the Violin Concerto in a letter to her in 1902, and then he composed the bulk of the music in 1903. He had intended for the German virtuoso Willy Burmester to premiere the work in Berlin, but Sibelius ended up rushing the debut (probably to get paid) and ended up with a disastrous performance from a local teacher. The star violinist Jascha Heifetz brought the work back into prominence in the 1930s, and over time it has rightfully become a pillar of the repertoire.  

Sibelius’ Violin Concerto opens with the icy chill of muted strings and an expressive melody from the solo violin. The entire first movement is broad and spacious, with drawn-out harmonies and lyrical solo flights, until the violin returns to the opening melody, now voiced in its luxurious low range. That same deep contralto sound returns at the start of the slow movement, introducing the song-like opening theme with a singer’s expressiveness.

The most unforgettable description of the finale, with its romping rhythmic play, came from the musicologist D. F. Tovey, who characterized the movement as a “polonaise for polar bears.” The music does have the typical driving rhythm in a 3/4 meter associated with the polonaise dance, although it is hard to imagine any polar bear that could be as lithe as the acrobatic solo violin.

Johannes Brahms

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1855-76)
Approximate duration: 44 minutes

“I shall never write a symphony,” Brahms claimed in 1872, after years of false starts in that genre. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!” The giant in question was Beethoven, and his legacy haunted Brahms, especially in the tradition-bound realm of symphonies and string quartets. Brahms was 40 by the time he released a quartet publicly; the same year, he completed the unconventional Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn for Orchestra. Having gained his confidence, Brahms returned to symphonic sketches that had languished since 1862. He labored over the First Symphony from 1874 to 1876, and he continued to make changes even once rehearsals started for the November 4 debut in Karlsruhe.

Brahms made no attempt to hide his debt to Beethoven in the First Symphony: Its key structure tracks the same course as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, moving from C minor to C major, and the finale uses a chorale theme that resembles the famous “Ode to Joy” of Beethoven’s Ninth. In response to a friend who noted the similarities, Brahms quipped, “Any ass can see that!”

The First Symphony’s slow introduction enters with full intensity, with a saturated melody climbing over the pulsing timpani. Throughout the body of the movement, the unmistakable interval of a falling major third (the same drop as in the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) appears in particularly charged moments.

The middle movements of the Symphony visit two foreign and untroubled worlds, with the slow movement moving to the bright key of E major, and the easygoing third movement starts with a breezy clarinet melody. After a slow introduction in the minor key, the finale arrives at major-key redemption with a majestic theme that Brahms based on a rustic alphorn tune he heard in Switzerland.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.