The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Concerto No. 17 in G major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 453
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Allegretto
Ingrid Fliter, piano
INTERMISSION
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Suite from Romeo and Juliet, Opus 64bis/ter
Montagues and Capulets
Juliet as a Young Girl
Masks
Friar Laurence
Dance
Romeo and Juliet Before Parting
Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb Death of Tybalt
The MSO Steinway was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ. The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. All programs are subject to change.
Guest Artist Biographies
MICHAEL SANDERLING
Michael Sanderling has been chief conductor of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester since 2021. His appointment followed a successful collaboration over many years, with a common goal of further developing the orchestra in late Romantic repertoire such as Bruckner, Mahler, and Strauss. Under Sanderling’s direction, the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester has toured Asia, South America, and Germany. Their performance of Shostakovich’s tenth symphony at the Wiener Konzerthaus, accompanied by William Kentridge’s animated film Oh to Believe in Another World, attracted particular attention.
Since the start of his tenure as chief conductor, several highly-acclaimed CDs have been released. These include a Brahms cycle released in 2023 by Warner Classics, with the four symphonies as well as his “fifth” — a piano quartet orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg — and a recording of the Schumann and Grieg piano concertos with Elisabeth Leonskaja.
As a guest conductor, Sanderling directs leading orchestras around the world. These include the Berlin Philharmoniker, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, the Wiener Symphoniker, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
From 2011 to 2019, Sanderling was chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. During this time, he raised the orchestra’s profile, establishing it as one of Germany’s leading ensembles. He performed with them both on the concert stage in Dresden and on numerous international tours, resulting in recordings of the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich for Sony Classical. Previously, he was chief conductor of the Kammerakademie Potsdam, where he was artistic director from 2006 to 2011.
In addition to the recordings mentioned above, Sanderling’s discography includes recordings of major works by Dvořák, Schumann, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky, as well as works for cello and orchestra by Bloch, Korngold, Bruch, and Ravel with Edgar Moreau and the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester.
Sanderling is a passionate supporter of young musicians. He teaches at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and works regularly with the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. From 2003 to 2013, he was chief conductor of the Deutsche Streicherphilharmonie youth orchestra.
Guest Artist Biographies
INGRID FLITER
Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter has won the admiration of audiences around the world for her passionate, thoughtful, and sensitive music-making. Winner of the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award — one of only a handful of pianists and the only woman to have received the honor — she divides her time between North America and Europe.
Fliter made her American orchestral debut with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra just days after the announcement of her Gilmore award. Since then, she has appeared with most of the major North American orchestras, including the Cleveland and Minnesota orchestras, the Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, National, Cincinnati, and New World symphonies, as well as at the Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, Aspen, Ravinia, and Grant Park summer festivals. During the 2024-25 season, Fliter returns to the Vancouver and Milwaukee symphony orchestras and the Minnesota Orchestra. Equally busy as a recitalist, she has performed in New York at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the Metropolitan Museum, and the 92nd Street Y, at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, and in Boston, San Francisco, and Detroit, as well as for the Van Cliburn Foundation in Fort Worth.
In Europe, Fliter has performed in recital in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Prague, Salzburg, Cologne, and Stockholm, and participated in festivals such as La Roque d’Anthéron, Prague Autumn, and the BBC Proms. Recent orchestral engagements include appearances with the Helsinki and Royal Stockholm philharmonics, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Ulster Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, and Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. In Asia, she has performed in recital in Singapore and at The World Pianist Series in Tokyo and with orchestras including the Israel, Hong Kong, and Osaka philharmonics.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Fliter began her piano studies in Argentina with Elizabeth Westerkamp. In 1992, she moved to Europe, where she continued her studies in Freiburg with Vitaly Margulis, in Rome with Carlos Bruno, and with Franco Scala and Boris Petrushansky at the Academy Foundation “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola, Italy, where she has been teaching since 2015. Fliter began playing public recitals at the age of 11 and made her professional orchestral debut at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires at the age of 16. Already the winner of several competitions in Argentina, she went on to win prizes at the Cantu International Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Italy, and in 2000 was awarded the silver medal at the Frederic Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
Program notes by David Jensen
FREDERICK DELIUS
Born 29 January 1862; Bradford, Yorkshire, England
Died 10 June 1934; Grez-sur-Loing, France
The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet
Composed: 1900-1901
First performance: 21 February 1907; Fritz Cassirer, conductor; Komische Oper Berlin
Last MSO performance: 12 March 2011; Edo de Waart, conductor
Despite his comparative obscurity in the landscape of modern English art music, Frederick Delius spent his life perfecting an idiosyncratic musical idiom that distinguished him as a wholly singular voice. He was born in Yorkshire as Fritz Theodor Albert (he didn’t adopt the name “Frederick” until his middle age) to German parents that had immigrated to England in search of more propitious professional circumstances. His family was a musical one, with the household welcoming as guests such luminaries as Joseph Joachim and Carlo Piatti, two of the great string virtuosi of their generation, and he began studying the violin at the age of six.
But his father Julius, an industrialist in the wool trade, expected him to inherit the mantle of the family business. Assignments to various posts as his father’s representative in England, Germany, Sweden, and France (and even a stint managing an orange plantation in Florida) were constantly undermined by his obsession with music and the cultural life of whatever country he happened to occupy at the time. By 1886, it was clear that he was bent on pursuing a life as a composer — his father began subsidizing his studies, and he enrolled in the conservatory at Leipzig, where he discovered his lifelong inspirations. He befriended the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, whose naturalistic approach to melody and form would influence his earliest works, but it was the extended, continuously developing chromatic harmonies of the Wagnerian school and the impressionistic stylings of Ravel and Debussy that would shape him most profoundly.
The Walk to the Paradise Garden is an intermezzo inserted between scenes in his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, a pastoral reimaging of the Shakespearean tragedy penned in the first years of the twentieth century. The drama follows Sali and Vrenchen, the son and daughter of two wealthy farming families warring over a plot of land. But the otherwise serene title belies a darker narrative: following a violent altercation that renders Vrenchen’s father insane, the pair make their way to a run-down inn — the “Paradise Garden” — where they draw the conclusion that their only choice is to die in each other’s arms.
The short tableau remains one of Delius’s most beloved for its sensuous orchestration and watercolor palette of sounds. The scene begins slowly and softly in a bucolic E-flat major, with winding, attractive melodies passing from one pairing of wind instruments to the next, supported by muted, syncopated strings. Motivic fragments emerge only briefly before being subsumed by the continually flowing harmonies woven by the strings. The music slides effortlessly between tonal centers without ever reading as overtly dissonant, making careful use of otherwise conventional scoring to build sparkling walls of sound that reach resplendent summits, and the interlude concludes with the soft haze of flutes suspended over the orchestra.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born 27 January 1756; Salzburg, Holy Roman Empire
Died 5 December 1791; Vienna, Austria
Concerto No. 17 in G major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 453
Composed: 1784
First performance: Uncertain; either 26 April 1784; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, piano; Kärntnertortheater, Vienna; or 13 June 1784; Barbara Ployer, piano; Ployer residence, Vienna
Last MSO performance: 30 September 1995; Eri Klas, conductor; Emanuel Ax, piano
The early 1780s were among the happiest and most constructive years of Mozart’s life. He had relocated to Vienna, unceremoniously bucked his commitments as composer to Hieronymus von Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and — much to his father’s chagrin — married the soprano Constanze Weber. Earning his living as a freelance musician, he had quickly established himself as one of the greatest pianists in Vienna, and his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio had premiered to great success, earning him a reputation as a composer of the first rank. He studied the music of Bach and Handel, began keeping a catalog of his compositions, and even befriended Franz Joseph Haydn, who both admired and inspired him. Mozart was not yet 30, and it must have seemed to him as though he could do anything.
By 1782, he was staging concerts to promote both his music and his talent at the keyboard, premiering multiple new piano concerti each season, and the nexus of opportunity, talent, and effort helped Mozart to effectively force the evolution of the genre. He began breaking new ground, striking a balance between technical mastery and symphonic dialogue, weaving the piano into an elegant, carefully sculpted orchestral canvas. The Piano Concerto No. 17, written for his pupil Barbara Ployer, is one of six concerti that Mozart drafted in 1784, and it stands out as a brilliant example of Mozart’s ability to craft charming and original musical material, develop it with facility, and conjure depth of expression and range of affect by means of meticulous orchestration.
The newfound prominence of the woodwinds is apparent from the beginning: the first movement allows for a sparkling exchange between soloist and orchestra, and the themes introduced at the outset are immediately varied and metamorphosed by the soloist, who carries them through harmonically adventurous terrain before they reach their apotheosis in one of Mozart’s own cadenzas. The central movement, making as much use of silence as it does of sound, treads a broad range of emotional territory, unraveling as a lyrical set of variations and splitting the difference between melodic simplicity and ornamental embellishment. The finale opens with an ebullient tune, and the soloist offers five variations on the theme before making a headlong musical leap into the closing Presto, calling to mind the virtuoso displays afforded to the closing numbers of his finest operas.
A few weeks after the concerto’s completion, Mozart noted the purchase of a common starling in his expense book. Impressed by its musical mimicry, he notated a melody it had chirped — almost identical to the theme of the K. 453 concerto’s third movement — alongside the remark: “Das war schön!” (“That was beautiful!”) Whether the bird was taught the tune by Mozart or had heard it whistled by a passing concertgoer is a matter of question.
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Born 27 April 1891; Sontsovka, Russia (now Ukraine)
Died 5 March 1953; Moscow, Russia
Suite from Romeo and Juliet, Opus 64bis/ter
Composed: June – September 1935; Suites No. 1 and No. 2 compiled in summer 1936; revised August – October 1939
First performance: 11 January 1940; Kirov Theatre (now Mariinsky Theatre), Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Russia Last MSO performance: 12 November 2016; Cristian Măcelaru, conductor
At the time, it probably seemed impossible to Prokofiev that his Romeo and Juliet would ever achieve acclaim as one of his most admired scores. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had been living abroad and working as a concert pianist for years — a trade he felt merely impeded his nobler ambitions as a composer. After spending more than a decade touring and vying with Igor Stravinsky for notoriety as the greatest Russian composer of his time (and feeling cornered by the global economic downtown of the 1930s), the chance to return to his homeland with a commission from Leningrad must have felt like manna from heaven.
He chose the scenario and began negotiations with the Kirov Theatre in late 1934, collaborating with playwright Adrian Piotrovsky and director Sergei Radlov on the ballet’s libretto, but the production quickly unraveled in the wake of Radlov’s resignation shortly thereafter. By the following summer, the Bolshoi Theater had issued Prokofiev an official contract for the ballet, and he toiled steadily from June until September to put his ideas to paper, orchestrating the music in the autumn of 1935.
But by early 1936, “all kinds of missteps” were obstructing the ballet’s realization. Dancers at the Bolshoi, threatening to strike, complained that it was impossible to dance to the highly rhythmic score, and Prokofiev’s decision to alter the ending such that Romeo and Juliet happily survived kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest. Platon Kerzhentsev, chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs, seized control of the Bolshoi’s artistic proceedings, disintegrating the administrative staff and earning Prokofiev a second cancellation.
Things went from bad to worse. In January, a printed condemnation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth appeared in Pravda, the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, stonewalling any avant-garde composer’s attempt at innovation. Piotrovsky, who had also contributed the libretto for Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream, saw his own name in the publication a week later. He was eventually arrested and executed in November 1937, one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalin’s Great Purge.
Having the good sense not to waste his efforts, Prokofiev distilled two suites from the ballet during the summer of 1936, which premiered to immediate success in Moscow, New York, Paris, and Prague. It was good advertising, and it ultimately landed Prokofiev the debut that the ballet deserved. In December 1938, audiences at the Mahen Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia finally enjoyed a one-act reduction of Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev, having unwittingly relinquished his passport to Soviet authorities that year, was unable to attend. When the entirety of the ballet (now revised, against Prokofiev’s wishes, to restore the tragic ending) premiered at the Kirov Theatre in early 1940, it was instantly lauded as a masterpiece of Soviet ballet.
2024.25 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke
Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
BYRON STRIPLING
Principal Pops Conductor
Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops
Conductor Chair
RYAN TANI
Assistant Conductor
CHERYL FRAZES HILL
Chorus Director
Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair
TIMOTHY J. BENSON
Assistant Chorus Director
FIRST VIOLINS
Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair
Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster, Thora M. Vervoren First Associate Concertmaster Chair
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Autumn Chodorowski
Yuka Kadota
Sheena Lan**
Elliot Lee**
Dylana Leung
Kyung Ah Oh
Lijia Phang
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair
Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*
Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Glenn Asch
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Clay Hancock
Paul Hauer
Janis Sakai**
Mary Terranova
VIOLAS
Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
Alejandro Duque
Nathan Hackett
Erin H. Pipal
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair
Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair
Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal
Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Brittany Conrad
Omar Haffar**
Paris Myers
HARP
Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair
FLUTES
Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair
Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
PICCOLO
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
OBOES
Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair
Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal
Margaret Butler
ENGLISH HORN
Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin
