Program Notes: Tao Plays Tchaikovsky

PROGRAM JAVIER ÁLVAREZ Brazos de niebla (Arms of Mist)

Based on text by Juan Felipe Herrera

(World premiere commissioned by the SDSO)

Gonzalo Ochoa, boy soprano

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso

Andante simplice Allegro con fuoco

CONRAD TAO

Conrad Tao, piano

Thursday, November 1 | 6:30PM

TAO PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY A Jacobs Masterworks Rush Hour 2.0 Concert

conductor David Danzmayr piano Conrad Tao boy soprano Gonzalo Ochoa Performance at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

The approximate running for this concert is fifty-five minutes. There is no intermission.

The Commission of Brazos de niebla is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Dorothea Laub, Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation and NEA.

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This concert includes a post-concert discussion with composer Javier Álvarez and US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.

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PROGRAM JAVIER ÁLVAREZ Brazos de niebla (Arms of Mist)

Based on text by Juan Felipe Herrera

(World premiere commissioned by the SDSO)

Gonzalo Ochoa, boy soprano

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso

Andante simplice Allegro con fuoco

CONRAD TAO

Friday, November 2 | 8PM Sunday, November 4 | 2PM

TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV

Conrad Tao, piano

INTERMISSION SERGE PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 Moderato Allegretto

Andante espressivo

Vivace

A Jacobs Masterworks Classical Concert

conductor David Danzmayr piano Conrad Tao boy soprano Gonzalo Ochoa All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

The approximate running for this concert, including intermission, is one hour and fifty minutes.

The Commission of Brazos de niebla is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Dorothea Laub, Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation and NEA. S A N D I EG O SYMPHONY ORC HESTRA 2018-19 SE ASON N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 8

The Nov. 2 performance includes a post-concert discussion with composer Javier Álvarez and US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.

P ERFO RM A N C ES MAG A Z I N E

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PROGRAM NOTES | TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV – NOVEMBER 2 & 4

ABOUT THE CONDUCTOR Described by The Herald as “extremely good, concise, clear, incisive and expressive,” DAVID DANZMAYR is widely regarded as one of the most talented and exciting conductors of his generation.

Danzmayr is Chief Conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, the first to hold this title in seven years. As leader of this orchestra, he is following in the footsteps of famous conductors such as Lovro von Matacic, Kazushi Ono and Dmitri Kitajenko. Performing regularly to sold-out audiences in Zagreb’s Lisinski Hall and having been awarded the Zagreb City Award, Danzmayr and his orchestra also already toured to the Salzburger Festspielhaus, where they received standing ovations performing the prestigious New Year’s concert and to the Wiener Musikverein. In addition, Danzmayr is music director of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, an orchestra comprised of musicians from all over the USA. Previously, Danzmayr served as music director of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra in Chicago, where he was lauded regularly by both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Classical Review for the performances. He was also the only conductor in the Chicago area who programmed a piece of American music on every concert.

Danzmayr has won prizes at some of the world’s most prestigious conducting competitions including a second prize at the International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition and prizes at the International Malko Conducting Competition. For his extraordinary success, he has been awarded the Bernhard Paumgartner Medal by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum.

Propelled by these early successes into a far reaching international career, Danzmayr quickly became a sought-after guest conductor for orchestras around the globe, including the symphonies of Oregon, Indianapolis, Detroit, North Carolina, San Diego, Colorado, Milwaukee and New Jersey, the Pacific Symphony, Chicago Civic Orchestra; and in Europe, the Deutsche

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DOROTHEA LAUB

DOROTHEA LAUB joined the Symphony Stars in the 1980’s and she has been a lifelong supporter of the symphony orchestras in every town she lived in for over 60 years.

Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Mozarteum Orchester, Essener Philharmoniker, Hamburger Symphoniker, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Odense Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg Chamber Philharmonic, Bruckner Orchester Linz, and the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Vienna and Stuttgart, to name a few.

He has served as assistant conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which he conducted in more than 70 concerts so far, performing in all the major Scottish concert halls and in the prestigious, Orkney-based, St Magnus Festival.

Danzmayr received his musical training at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg where, after initially studying piano, he went on to study conducting in the class of Dennis Russell Davies.

He finished his studies with the highest honors. Danzmayr was strongly influenced by Pierre Boulez and Claudio Abbado in his time as conducting stipendiate of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and by Leif Segerstam during his additional studies in the conducting class at the Sibelius Academy. Subsequently, he gained significant experience as assistant to Neeme Järvi, Stephane Deneve, Carlos Kalmar, Sir Andrew Davis and Pierre Boulez, who entrusted Danzmayr with the preparatory rehearsals for his own music. n

ABOUT THE ARTIST CONRAD TAO has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer, and has been dubbed a musician of “probing intellect and openhearted vision” by The New York Times, a “thoughtful and mature composer” by NPR, and “ferociously talented” by Time Out New York. In June 2011, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and the Department of Education named Tao a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him a YoungArts gold medal in music. Later that year, Tao was named a Gilmore Young Artist, an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. In May 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2018 was named a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist.

Tao began his 2018-19 season with the world premiere of his composition, Everything Must Go, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic. Tao also inaugurated Nightcap, a new series at the New York Philharmonic where performers curate a late-night concert, joined by dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher and Charmaine Lee for an evening of multidisciplinary performances.

He makes his LA Opera debut in the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s new work, the loser, where he plays the onstage role of the apparition and memory of Glenn Gould. In January 2019, Tao and dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher continue to develop More Forever, their evening-length multidisciplinary work which explores American vernacular dance traditions, as part of Guggenheim’s Works & Process series.

Tao continues to perform concertos with orchestras around the

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PROGRAM NOTES | TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV – NOVEMBER 2 & 4 world including returns to the Swedish Radio Symphony, the San Diego Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia with Antonio Pappano. Tao also performs duo chamber music concerts with violinist Stefan Jackiw, including a debut performance at 92Y, ensemble engagements with the JCT Trio in Seoul, South Korea; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Interlochen, Michigan, as well as solo recital programs.

This season comes after his Lincoln Center recital debut, a residency with the Utah Symphony, and debut engagements with the Atlanta Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Seattle Symphony, and return engagements with the Berner Symphoniker, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Verdi Milano, and the Malaysian Philharmonic. Last season, Tao performed in his own recital and composed a new work for Paul Huang and Orion Weiss at Washington Performing Arts Society, and opened the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra’s season with the world premiere of a newly commissioned work, Over. Additionally, Tao developed a multimedia work, Ceremony, with vocalist Charmaine Lee. In June 2013, Tao kicked off the inaugural UNPLAY Festival at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, which he curated and produced.

The festival, designated a “critics’ pick” by Time Out New York and hailed by The New York Times for its “clever organization” and “endlessly engaging” performances, featured Tao with guest artists performing a wide variety of new works. Across three nights encompassing electroacoustic music, performance art, youth ensembles, and much more, UNPLAY explored the fleeting ephemera of the Internet, the possibility of a 21st-century canon, and music’s role in social activism and critique. That month, Tao, a Warner Classics recording artist, also released Voyages, his first full-length for the label, declared a “spiky debut” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Of the album, NPR wrote: “Tao proves himself to be a musician of deep intellectual and emotional means – as the thoughtful programming on this album … proclaims.” His next album, Pictures, which slots works by David Lang, Toru Takemitsu, Elliott Carter, and Tao himself alongside Mussorgsky’s familiar and beloved Pictures at an Exhibition, was hailed by The New York Times as “a fascinating album [by] a thoughtful artist and dynamic performer … played with enormous imagination, color and command.”

Tao’s career as composer has garnered an eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and the Carlos Surinach Prize from BMI. In the 2013-14 season, while serving as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-residence, Tao premiered his orchestral composition, The world is very different now. Commissioned in observance of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the work was described

by The New York Times as “shapely and powerful.” Most recently, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia commissioned a new work for piano, orchestra, and electronics, An Adjustment, which received its premiere in September 2015 with Tao at the piano. The Philadelphia Inquirer declared the piece abundant in “compositional magic,” a “most imaginative [integration of] spiritual post-Romanticism and ‘90s club music.”

Tao was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1994. He studied piano with Emilio del Rosario in Chicago and Yoheved Kaplinsky in New York, and composition with Christopher Theofanidis. n

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ABOUT THE COMPOSER Composer, educator and creative intellectual JAVIER ÁLVAREZ is, according to musicologist Yolanda Moreno, “the most interesting Mexican musician born in the fifties.” His chamber, symphonic and electroacoustic works are sustained by the command of a plurality of techniques and an eclectic perspective yielding over the past 30 years, a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that has earned him critical international acclaim.

Born in 1956 and raised in Mexico, Álvarez grew up in a family of architects, learned the clarinet and started composing at an early age, playing jazz and traditional Mexican music during his adolescence. The artistic, literary and musical effervescence of his native country and his studies at the National Conservatoire with mentors Mario Lavista and Daniel Catán helped him to quickly attain recognition as an emerging composer in the early seventies. After traveling abroad and earning further degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the Royal College of Music and the City University in London – where he lived and worked for nearly 25 years – he returned to Mexico in 2005 and has since lived in Mérida, in the peninsula of Yucatan.

Among other distinctions, Álvarez has received awards from the Mexican National Endowment for the Arts and Culture, the Mendelssohn and the Civitella Ranieri Foundations and has been a member of the Mexican Academy of Arts since 2005. In 2013 he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, the highest distinction conferred by the Mexican State to the country’s artists and scientists. More recently, in 2014, he was bestowed with the Medalla Bellas Artes by the Institute of Fine Arts and Literature in recognition of his lifelong contribution to Mexico's art and culture. Álvarez’s work has been commissioned and performed by many prestigious ensembles, including the New London Chamber Choir, London Sinfonietta, L’Orchestre Nationale de France, Tambuco, Ictus, the Brodsky Quartet, Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Chicago Symphony New Music Group, Orquesta del Palacio de Minería, BBC Concert Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa, European Chamber Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional and Mexico City Philharmonic.

He has written works for renowned soloists Ricardo Gallardo, Gloria Cheng, Luis Julio Toro, Florent Jodelet, Luis Humberto Ramos, Vinko Globokar, Fernando Dominguez, Harry Sparnaay and collaborated with many others.

In addition to a prolific creative career, Álvarez has taught at the Royal College of Music and at the University of Hertfordshire.

Whilst living in England, he headed Sonic Arts Network, the British society for electroacoustic music and was Artistic Director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. Having taught composition for three years at the Music Academy in Malmö, in Sweden, Álvarez became visiting professor at the Paris Conservatoire and at the City University in London. On his return to Mexico, he became a founding member of the then nascent P ERFO RM A N C ES MAG A Z I N E

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PROGRAM NOTES | TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV – NOVEMBER 2 & 4 Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán where he continues to teach composition to date. He is currently on the Artistic Board of the Morelia Music Festival and is active as an independent composer and project animateur. n JUAN FELIPE HERRERA was born in Fowler, California in 1948. He is the author of 30 books of poetry, novels for young adults, and collections for children, including Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the International Latino Book Award. His other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, and a PEN / Beyond Margins Award. Elected a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets in 2011, Herrera served as the Poet Laureate of California from 2012-2015. In 2016 he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement at the 36th L.A. Times Book Prizes.

Herrera received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Masters’ degree in social anthropology from Stanford University, and a Masters’ of Fine Arts degree at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He published his first collection of poems, Rebozos of Love, in 1974.

Herrera has also published 11 books of young adult and children’s books, including most recently Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes (2014), a picture book showcasing inspiring Hispanic and Latino Americans.

Herrera’s other major honors include a PEN USA National Poetry Award and the PEN Oakland / Josephine Miles Award as well as two Américas Awards; two Pura Belpré Author Honor Awards; the Independent Publisher Book Award; the Ezra Jack Keats Award; and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Stanford University Chicano Fellows.

Herrera has served as the Chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno and held the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside, where he taught until retiring in 2015. A visiting professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington-Seattle in 2015, he lives in Fresno, CA. n

the article, so much so that by the time I started composing Brazos de niebla, I knew I wanted to create a piece which would in some way deal with the calamitous phenomenon of immigration. Things became clearer when I first discussed the idea with my admired friend, the poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Auspiciously, during our conversations we tacitly understood each other; we brainstormed for a while and finally agreed to focus the project on the depiction of the thoughts and feelings of an imaginary young immigrant child.

Brazos de niebla (Arms of Mist) takes its title from the extraordinary poem that Juan Felipe eventually wrote: a poignant lament of a youngster lost in the haze of circumstances that ignore him, a child mislaid in the solitude, events and delusions that encircle his jumbled experience as an immigrant. In reading the poem for the first time, the line "brazos de niebla" (arms of mist) struck me as a peculiar deep and immensely persuasive image that not only encapsulated the formidable strength of the poem’s metaphors but also gave rise to my overall conception of the work. Thus, Brazos de niebla is structured in three complete parts, each one organized as a sequence of rhythmic musical “outbreaks” which take place in the course of a fictional (but essentially musical) journey. Though these episodes do not necessarily bear a programmatic intention, they serve as emotional landmarks that allow me to frame the extended middle section where a boy soprano intones Juan Felipe’s compelling words. The work also features an instrumental section within the orchestra made up of four of Mexican vihuelas; these small strumming guitars pervade the music with a distinctive color which I trust acts as an additional symbol of the transcultural and transient territories implicit in the poetry.

The work was composed in the spring of 2018 on a commission from the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, to which it is dedicated. n

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg

JAVIER ÁLVAREZ Born May 8, 1956, Mexico City

Tchaikovsky drafted this most famous of piano concertos in November and December 1874, when he was a young professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Only modestly talented as a pianist and insecure about his handling of larger forms, Tchaikovsky sought the advice of Nicholai Rubinstein, head of the Conservatory and the man to whom he intended to dedicate the concerto. Rubinstein listened in silence as Tchaikovsky played the new work through, and then there burst from Rubinstein’s mouth a mighty torrent of words. He spoke quietly at first, then he waxed hot, and finally he resembled Zeus hurling thunderbolts. It seems that my concerto was utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable. Certain passages were so commonplace and awkward they could not be improved, and the piece as a whole was bad, trivial, vulgar. I had stolen this from somebody and that from somebody else, so that only two or three pages were good for anything and all the rest should be wiped out or radically rewritten.

Composer Javier Álvarez has provided a program note: A year before I began working on Brazos de niebla, I read an article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais that described in considerable detail the plight of immigrants who habitually embark on a perilous journey between Colombia and Panama. I was deeply moved by

Stung (and furious), Tchaikovsky refused to change a note, erased the dedication to Rubinstein, and instead dedicated the concerto to the German pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow, who had championed his music. Bülow promptly took the concerto on a tour of the United States, and it was in Boston on October 25, 1875, that

ABOUT THE MUSIC Brazos de niebla (Arms of Mist) (World Premiere)

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PROGRAM NOTES | TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV – NOVEMBER 2 & 4 Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was heard for the first time.

It was a huge success on that occasion, and Bülow played it repeatedly in this country to rhapsodic reviews. A critic in Boston, taking note of that success, described the concerto as an “extremely difficult, strange, wild, ultra-modern Russian Concerto,” but back in Russia the composer read the press clippings and was beside himself with happiness: “Think what healthy appetites these Americans must have! Each time Bülow was obliged to repeat the whole finale of my concerto! Nothing like that happens in our country.” It only remains to be said that Rubinstein eventually saw the error of his early condemnation and became one of the concerto’s great champions. (It should also be noted that in 1889 – perhaps more aware of Rubinstein’s criticisms than he cared to admit – Tchaikovsky did in fact take the concerto through a major revision, and it is in this form that we know it today.)

The concerto has one of the most dramatic beginnings in all the literature, ringing with horn fanfares and cannonades of huge piano chords, followed by one of Tchaikovsky’s Great Tunes, in which that horn fanfare is transformed into a flowing melody for strings.

This opening has become extremely famous, but this introductory section has many quirks. It is in the “wrong” key (D-flat Major), and – however striking it may be – it never returns in any form: Tchaikovsky simply abandons all this tremendous material when he gets to the main section of the movement. This “real” beginning, marked Allegro con spirito, is finally in the correct key of B-flat minor, and the piano’s skittering main subject is reportedly based on a tune Tchaikovsky heard a blind beggar whistle at a fair in the Ukraine. To his patroness, Madame von Meck, Tchaikovsky wrote: “It is curious that in [the Ukraine] every blind beggar sings exactly the same tune with the same refrain. I have used part of this refrain in my pianoforte concerto.” The expected secondary material quickly appears – a chorale-like theme for winds and a surging, climbing figure for strings – though Tchaikovsky evades expectations by including multiple cadenzas for the soloist in this movement. The piano writing is of the greatest difficulty, with much of it in great hammered octaves.

The Andantino simplice is aptly named, for this truly is simple music in the best sense of that term: over pizzicato chords, solo flute sings the gentle main theme, an island of calm after the searing first movement. A scherzo-like central episode marked Prestissimo leads to the return of the opening material. The finale, marked Allegro con fuoco, is also well named, for here is music full of fire. It is a rondo based on the piano’s nervous, dancing main theme, and while calmer episodes break into this furious rush, the principal impression this music makes is of white-hot energy, and this “strange, wild, ultra-modern Russian Concerto” rushes to a knock-out close that is just as impressive to audiences today as it was to that first Boston audience in 1875. n

and suffered a concussion from which he never really recovered, and now – only 60 years old – he was so frail that he could work for barely an hour each day. And he was working under horrific conditions. Three years earlier, in February 1948, Stalin’s ideological watchdog Andrei Zhdanov convened the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers specifically to crack down on Russian composers and bring them into ideological conformity. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky and others were attacked for writing “confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony,” music that “dwells too much on the dark and fearful aspects of reality.” Prokofiev, who had made his reputation 40 years earlier as the enfant terrible of Russian music, was reduced to writing sanitized and politically-correct scores, such as a symphonic poem composed for the opening of the Volga Dam canal and the oratorio On Guard for Peace. Fearful for their lives, Russian artists were keeping a low profile during the paranoia and repression of Stalin’s icy final years. Prokofiev was well enough that his doctors let him attend the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in Moscow on October 11, 1952, but that would prove his final public appearance – he died five months later (by a bitter irony, on the same day Stalin died).

The Seventh Symphony has come in for a hard time from Western critics, who see it as a product of the composer’s “tired” final years, a sign of his “capitulation” to Soviet demands for music for the masses. It is true that – coming after Prokofiev’s heroic Fifth Symphony and anguished Sixth, two of the twentieth century’s finest symphonies – the Seventh can seem gentle and understated.

It was commissioned by the Children’s Division of Moscow Radio, and Prokofiev himself described it as “a simple symphony, for young listeners.” Yet after the first run-through at rehearsal, he appeared to have doubts, worrying: “Isn’t the music rather too simple?” Some of the difficulty lies in the title “symphony,” a term that seems to imply a substantial and dramatic work. Perhaps calling the music a symphonic suite would have occasioned less criticism. In any case, this music – for all its light spirits – is clearly symphonic in form, and it calls for a large orchestra.

The Seventh Symphony bursts to life on a soaring theme that conveys a wonderful sense of space, and this idea will recur throughout the movement. The second subject is a broad melody that rises out of the low strings and winds, and Prokofiev closes out the exposition with a piquant little tune for oboe and flute enlivened by the accompaniment of bells and harp – Prokofiev’s keen sense of instrumental color remained strong throughout his career. This movement is in sonata form, but it is without the conflict, without the tension and resolution that mark most symphonic opening movements. Even Prokofiev’s tempo indication for this movement – Moderato rather than the expected Allegro – suggests a relaxation of mood, and the music closes with quiet reminiscences of the opening theme.

SERGE PROKOFIEV Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka Died March 5, 1953, Moscow

The second movement is a waltz, but this is one of those wonderful Prokofiev waltzes that dance vigorously and never quite settle into the rhythms we expect. He marks the beginning Allegretto, but this quickly accelerates into an Allegro as the music begins to dance; two trio sections break the progress of this waltz. The Andante espressivo, lyric and brief, is based on a theme Prokofiev had originally written in 1936.

Prokofiev composed his seventh – and final – symphony in 195152. This was not a good time for the composer. He had fallen

The last movement, marked Vivace, is the expected good-natured finale. Full of energy, it does feel as if it had been conceived for

Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131

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PROGRAM NOTES | TCHAIKOVSKY AND PROKOFIEV – NOVEMBER 2 & 4 children. Throughout, one is reminded of a youth festival or a circus or a sleigh-ride – some lighthearted occasion brimming with happy energy. It is an appropriate ending for a piece of music intended, at least in part, for children. But the very end brings surprises.

Prokofiev recalls themes from earlier movements, and the music slows to a quiet conclusion with the unusual marking pensieroso: “thoughtful.” At the first rehearsal of this symphony, some of those in the audience convinced Prokofiev that the symphony needed a “happy” ending, so he wrote a 26-measure addition – essentially a quick variant of the movement’s main theme – to bring the symphony to its close. Mstislav Rostropovich is reported to have said that Prokofiev hoped the more abrupt conclusion would eventually be the accepted one, but at the premiere – and in virtually all subsequent performances – it is the “happy” ending that brings Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony to its sunny conclusion; it is perhaps no accident that at the first performance the audience demanded that the finale be repeated.

Program History

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, San Diego Symphony Archivist These concerts offer a world premiere, Brazos de niebla by Javier Álvarez, commissioned by the San Diego Symphony. The famous First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky was first heard at these concerts when Fabien Sevitzky led its initial performance here during the summer season of 1949, the first season available to the newly reorganized San Diego Symphony (and all civilians) in Balboa Park after its closing in World War II. Holdz Zepeda was the soloist, and since then 22 more hearings of this concerto were given here, most recently in the 2010-11 season, when Lang Lang was the soloist under Jahja Ling's baton. In the 1975-76 season, Peter Erős conducted the only performances of the Prokofiev Seventh Symphony to be played at these concerts until these current hearings. n

Shortly after the symphony’s premiere, the frail Prokofiev made a list of the next seven pieces that he planned to compose, but at this point further work was beyond him. The Seventh Symphony was his final completed composition. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger n

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