Program Notes

Antônio Carlos Gomes
Overture to Il Guarany (1870)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

The Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Gomes had an early job as an assistant conductor at an opera house in Rio de Janeiro, where he absorbed the sounds of trendy Italian operas by the likes of Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini. The two operas that Gomes wrote in his twenties were received so enthusiastically in Rio that the government paid for him to continue his studies in Milan, and before long he was attracting such a following in that epicenter of Italian opera that he was invited to present a new work at Milan’s legendary Teatro alla Scala. Leaning into his roots, Gomes created Il Guarany, using an Italian libretto based on a Brazilian novel that dramatized an illicit romance between an Indigenous woman and a Portuguese nobleman in the early period of colonization. The next year, as Gomes watched his opera become an international sensation produced in theaters across Europe, he replaced his original short prelude with a fittingly grand overture that previewed important themes and established the atmosphere of Brazil as a volatile meeting ground of European and Indigenous cultures.

Joaquín Rodrigo
Concierto de Aranjuez (1939)
Approximate duration: 25 minutes

Joaquín Rodrigo, blind from age three, first took up music in Valencia, near his birthplace on the eastern coast of Spain. After studying and working in France and Germany, he settled in Madrid in 1939, where he became famous for writing music that resonated with Spain’s rich musical history, including its role as the birthplace of the guitar that descended from the Arabic lutes brought by Northern African occupiers.

Rodrigo’s most famous work is still the first concerto he wrote not long after arriving in Madrid, inspired by the nearby palace and gardens at Aranjuez (a royal property built as a hunting lodge in the 1500s and rebuilt on a grand scale in the 1700s to rival Versailles in France). The Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and chamber orchestra became a staple of concert programming, and it crossed over into pop culture through numerous recordings and adaptions, including the 1960 album Sketches of Spain by trumpeter Miles Davis.

The fast first movement begins with strummed chords from the guitar and a rhythmic pattern that alternates between two and three strong beats per measure, anchoring this classical composition in the sound world of flamenco and other Spanish folk styles. Another aspect of flamenco informs the extraordinarily beautiful and mournful Adagio, with ornamented inflections and voice-like phrases from the English horn that reflect the Cante jondo or “deep song” style of singing steeped in Arabic and Romani influences. In the final movement, playful rhythms and unexpected key changes add artsy flair to the folk-like main theme.

Richard Strauss
Don Juan, Op. 20 (1888)
Approximate duration: 19 minutes

Richard Strauss began his musical life with conservative tastes, taking after his father (the great horn player Franz Strauss) in a preference for the Classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It was only once Richard Strauss left home that his ears opened up to the “music of the future,” to quote a phrase associated with his new musical idol, Richard Wagner. In time, Strauss would inherit Wagner’s mantle as the king of forward-thinking opera, but first he followed another progressive icon, Franz Liszt, into the realm of the symphonic poem—a piece for orchestra alone that follows a specific program or story. Strauss’ first “tone poem,” to use his preferred label, was Macbeth (1888), but it was the next one, Don Juan, that really put the 25-year-old Strauss on the map.

It was through Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni that Strauss first encountered the centuries-old legend of Don Juan, as the sex-crazed scoundrel is known in the original Spanish. Strauss did not spell out exactly how his tone poem lines up with the story, but the dashing passage at the beginning surely marks the appearance of Don Juan, while the coy phrases that come in response must be his conquests. The amorous episodes, interspersed with pangs of self-doubt and regret, build to the central romance of the work, a vulnerable love song first offered by a solo oboe. A vigorous horn motive brings back the rakish aspect of Don Juan, and the ensuing storminess rushes him to judgment. The music representing Don Juan’s death reaches a tense silence, and then an eerie coda leads to a final state of unsettled, trembling quietude.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Capriccio espagnol, Op. 34 (1887)
Approximate duration: 18 minutes

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov played some piano as a child in provincial Russia, and the operas he saw in Saint Petersburg while he was training to be a naval officer inspired him to find a private teacher who taught him piano and the rudiments of composition and music theory. He was on track for an accomplished career in the Navy when an auspicious introduction to the composer and critic Mily Balakirev transformed his side hobby into something much more. Balakirev aspired to develop an authentic Russian sound in concert music, and his strategy was to find young, malleable musicians with unrealized talent and mold them into national heroes. The gamble paid off as Rimsky-Korsakov and other like-minded amateurs matured into the celebrated clique known forever as the “Russian Five.”

The quality that came to define Rimsky-Korsakov was his exhaustive drive to perfect every aspect of his craft, especially after he accepted a faculty position at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. His signature talent proved to be orchestration, that art of using the many instruments of the orchestra in every possible combination to evoke the full spectrum of tonal colors. After crafting a successful fantasy for violin and orchestra on Russian themes, he looked abroad for further sonic inspiration, leading to two of his most influential works for orchestra: this Capriccio espagnol inspired by the folk traditions of Spain, followed by Scheherazade with its Arabian shimmer.

Capriccio espagnol begins with festive wake-up call in the form of an Alborada, the morning equivalent of an evening serenade. The Variations that come next offer a master class in orchestration, reframing the same slow-moving theme in a dazzling array of symphonic sounds. A modified repeat of the Alborada bookends the Variations movement.

The most demonstrably “Spanish” music of Capriccio espagnol comes in the dramatic fourth movement labeled Scena e canto gitano (“Scene and Gypsy Song”). Solo cadenzas capture the free-flowing spirit of the cante jondo, or “deep song,” an emotionally charged style of flamenco singing. The final movement takes up a Spanish folk dance style, the Fandango asturiano. The Gaelic tone of the music is well suited to the remote northern region of Asturias, which was settled by the Celts who brought a form of bagpipes.

– © 2026 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.