Program Notes

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
Notturno (2004)
Approximate duration: 14 minutes

Michael Tilson Thomas was destined to lead a big life in music, carrying on the legacy of his immigrant grandparents who dominated Yiddish musical theater in America, and the generations of cantors before them whose voices filled synagogues in Ukraine. A child prodigy on piano, MTT went on to study composing and conducting at the University of Southern California. From his early stardom as an associate conductor with the Boston Symphony, through his founding of the New World Symphony and his historic 25-year tenure as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, his electrifying presence on the podium tended to overshadow the vibrant, impeccable music he continued to compose. He wrote the Notturno for flute, harp and string orchestra in 2005 for concert flutist Paula Robison (who is also MTT’s sister-in-law) and as a tribute to Paul Renzi, the principal flutist of the San Francisco Symphony for 50 years. New World Symphony gave the world premiere of Notturno in 2005 with MTT and Robison at the Lincoln Theatre.

Like the piece itself, MTT’s program note is characteristically charming and playful, and yet suffused with a probing wisdom as it considers what it takes to hold on to a sense of wonder.

Notturno is a virtuoso piece evoking the lyrical world of Italian music. Its shape recalls concert arias, “etudes de concert” and salon pieces—creations of a bygone world that I still hold in great esteem. I remember the great care and attention that Piatigorsky and Heifetz lavished on such pieces, and some of the seemingly effortless charm of that genre has found its way into this work.

This piece has a subtext. It’s about the role music plays in the life of a musician and the role we musicians play (must play?) in life. It’s about musicians first discovering the wonder of music and their own unique voice. Then, of course, there’s the profession: the concerts, gigs, the routine, and the wear and tear that can lead you to ask, “Why am I carrying on with all this trilling and arpeggiating?” But, we play what we must play with excellence and commitment, even if it drives us nearly over the edge. The great part is, if we have a chance to take a little breath, we discover that the wonder never goes away.

— Michael Tilson Thomas

GUSTAV MAHLER
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 (1901-02)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, upwardly mobile Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic. Although he focused on composition as a student at the Vienna Conservatory, his meteoric rise as a conductor soon crowded out his composing, leaving him only limited time to explore the two genres he was most attracted to in his own music: songs and symphonies.

Mahler began his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901, a few months after nearly dying from an intestinal hemorrhage. By the time he returned to his summer villa to complete the Symphony in 1902, his world had turned much rosier: He had met and married Alma Schindler, and she was expecting their first child. Mahler tinkered with the Symphony’s orchestration until the premiere performance, which he conducted in October 1904 in Cologne, and he continued to make various changes in the following years. Reflecting later about his struggles to perfect the Fifth Symphony, he wrote, “Clearly the routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies had deserted me altogether, as though a totally new message demanded a new technique.”

Mahler’s first four symphonies drew much of their energy from vocal music, with the first quoting lieder melodies and the next three incorporating actual singers. With the Fifth Symphony, Mahler’s “new message” steered him closer to absolute music than in any previous work.

Mahler applied the diminutive heading Adagietto to this symphony’s slow movement, which drapes a simple, singing melody over poignant harmonies enunciated with angelic flecks of harp. A friend of the Mahlers, the conductor Willem Mengelberg, indicated that the Adagietto was a musical love letter from Gustav to Alma; others have recognized an elegiac tint to its beauty, including MTT’s mentor Leonard Bernstein, who conducted it at a memorial service for Robert Kennedy.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, “Choral” (1822-24)
Approximate duration: 65 minutes

In the face of poor health, continued hearing loss, and family troubles related to the care of his nephew, Beethoven’s output as a composer slowed to a trickle. He was reenergized in part by an invitation, received in 1817, to compose two new symphonies for the Philharmonic Society of London, although several years passed before he took up the project. In that time, he produced a series of monumental works, including the “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata, the Diabelli Variations and his enormous Missa solemnis. With that Mass mostly complete in 1823, he finally turned to the symphonic commission.

Plans for what might have been two distinct symphonies merged into one massive composition, capped by an unprecedented finale featuring chorus and vocal soloists. Beethoven completed that Symphony No. 9 in 1824, and he introduced it in Vienna on the same program that featured the first public hearing of selections from Missa solemnis. Beethoven was by that point as deaf as he was stubborn; he insisted on “conducting” the Symphony’s premiere, even though the performers knew to ignore him.

Beethoven’s Ninth pushed the limits of the symphony even further than his heroic Symphony No. 3 or the fateful Symphony No. 5. Like the Third, it stretched symphonic proportions to unimaginable size and breadth, and like the Fifth, it unified all components in a sweeping journey from a conflicted minor key to a triumphant major key. The most striking departure from convention came in the finale, which added voices to a Symphony for the first time to deliver the immortal “Ode to Joy.” Beethoven had been contemplating setting those verses by Friedrich Schiller for more than 30 years, and in the Ninth Symphony he finally found a vehicle to express all the rapture and exuberance of the text.

With a message and impact that is deeply personal and in no small part spiritual, the Ninth Symphony is a quintessential product of Beethoven’s transcendent “late” period. But the musical methods still reflect the great advancements of his “middle” period, when he learned to strip his motives down to the utmost clarity and to assemble those building blocks into structures of uncanny precision and cohesion. That elemental quality announces itself from the outset of the Ninth Symphony, with an opening movement that fixates on the resonant intervals of perfect fifths and fourths. Relief might seem imminent after that movement settles sternly on the home key of D minor, but then the Scherzo dives right back in with obsessive leaps in the same key, this time pounding on the motive of a descending octave.

The spacious third movement outlines two main themes, the first in B-flat major in a four-beat tempo, and the second shifting to a 3/4 pulse and reaching the significant key of D major. These two themes develop in turn through a series of warm, patient variations.

All the preceding music serves to set up the epic finale of the Ninth Symphony, a single movement that lasts about as long as Beethoven’s entire First Symphony. In case we have lost track of the journey that has led to this juncture, a tense introduction gives us flashbacks of the three preceding movements and tantalizing hints of the way forward. Only then do we land definitively in the redemptive key of D major, and the cellos and basses issue the first full statement of that simple, stepwise melody that so thoroughly changed the course of music. Finally the “Ode to Joy” can begin its epic rise, a rich interweaving of soloists, chorus and worldly orchestration (including a raucous march in the “Turkish” style) that delivers astounding new delights with every turn.

– © 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.