OVERTURE TO ROSAMUNDE
FRANZ SCHUBERT 
Duration: 11 Minutes

Despite his short lifetime, Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) amassed a major collection of masterpieces, including art songs (lieder), works for the piano, symphonies, and masses. Most consider his music to be a link between Classical and Romantic musical eras.

Schubert grew up in a fairly extraordinary musical family, one which regularly practiced and performed string quartets at home. His father ran a music school, and Franz had ample opportunity to study and perform—on violin, viola, organ and piano—the best music of the time. For a time he was a composition student of Antonio Salieri (from Amadeus fame).

A diminutive boy, Schubert was shy and unconfident of his musical powers—as performer or composer. Yet by the age of 17 he had composed Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, now considered one of the greatest songs in musical literature. 

Schubert continued to write hundreds of remarkable lieder; they became the young composer’s musical (and financial) calling-card. In the 1820s, performances of his songs gained Schubert fame—and financial support—in the homes of wealthy Viennese. 

Schubert tried to support himself by teaching music in his father’s school, a task for which he was neither temperamentally nor constitutionally suited. Though he had generous, supportive friends, he did not make much money from his compositions, and later he felt he needed to take a position as music master for two daughters of Count Esterházy.

In 1820 Schubert composed incidental music for the opera The Magic Harp. Though the opera was not a success, its sparkling overture was excised and later  repurposed as the Rosamunde overture (for yet another unsuccessful opera), which you will hear tonight. It has become one of Schubert’s most enduring and well-known works. After a lengthy and dramatic introduction, the overture follows a fairly Classical sonata form, with an exposition of the main theme, a development section of musical ideas, and then a recapitulation of the original theme.

Schubert remained painfully self-conscious throughout his short life. And he was rarely without financial constraints. It was only shortly before his death in 1828 that the renowned composer of numerous piano works and exquisite songs with piano accompaniment could afford to buy himself a piano. He died at the age of 31 from typhoid fever.

This work was performed on the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra’s inaugural concert in 1934.

ORCHARD IN FOG CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN & ORCHESTRA
ADAM SCHOENBERG
Duration: 22 Minutes

Adam Schoenberg (b. 1980) is one of the rising stars of American composers. His musical formation began at Oberlin College, and he then studied at Juilliard where he completed a doctorate in musical arts. His compositions have won numerous prizes, among them an Emmy and the Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He has garnered numerous commissions; tonight’s work in fact was commissioned by violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. Schoenberg has served as composer-in-residence at the Kansas City Symphony and the Fort Worth Symphony among others. He currently is on the faculty of Occidental College in California.

Tonight’s work, premiered in 2018, bears the name Orchard in Fog, which is also the name of a photograph by Adam Laipson of an apple orchard frozen in winter fog. That orchard, in New Salem, Massachusetts, happens to be the composer’s hometown, and since Schoenberg so admired the photograph, Laipson presented it to him as a wedding present. Later, when Meyers asked Schoenberg to write a violin concerto for her, the composer thought immediately of the photo and its powerful effect upon him. From that inspiration, Schoenberg has fashioned this work in three movements, slow-fast-slow, which departs from the fast-slow-fast format of traditional concertos.

In the words of the composer: “Orchard in Fog tells the story of an aging man visiting the orchard where he was once married many years ago. It is the dead of winter, and he is now weak and tired, nearing the end of his life. The first movement (Frail) is reflective...and features a series of melodies that are more melancholic than hopeful... Movement II (Dancing) is a memory. It captures the old man looking back on his wife and all of the beautiful, youthful moments he had with her. The movement is essentially one long dance. . . .Movement III (Farewell Song) gradually brings us back to the present day, and to the orchard where the old man’s journey first began. This is his farewell song to his love, and to the life that he has known...  Whereas movement I was more somber in tone, this movement gives us a glimmer of hope and acceptance.”

SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN F MINOR, OP. 36 
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Duration: 42 Minutes

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93) was the first Russian composer whose works acquired international audiences and acclaim. Today, listeners around the world are familiar with the piano concerto in B-flat, the violin concerto, ballets such as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, innumerable shorter compositions for voice and various instruments, as well as six symphonies of which the fourth is tonight’s pièce de résistance.

This monumental work—its first movement alone is about as long as most classical symphonies, and there are three more (!)--premiered in 1878. Like Schubert, a composer who was insecure about the quality and likability of his work, Tchaikovsky felt that his earlier three symphonies were inferior efforts. Yet, of this symphony, he wrote that “it seems to me that this symphony is better than anything I have done.” He was writing to his benefactor Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy Russian (despite the German surname) widow, who for many years financially supported the work of the brilliant Russian composer. Curiously enough, the two never met though they maintained a lively personal correspondence over many years. (In 1890 this same woman engaged a young French composer, Claude Debussy, to provide music instruction to her children and provide piano accompaniment for home concerts. What a change for Tchaikovsky’s musical muse!)

The Symphony No. 4 in F-minor was dedicated to “Nadezhda von Meck, my best friend,” and in other correspondence Tchaikovsky calls von Meck a “co-creator” of the symphony. The composer also claimed that the symphony was a “characterization of the nature of fate,” which has become the go-to description of its musical ethos—and main theme. Surely the frightening opening fanfare—blasting brass and bassoons in metronomic syncopation—creates a dire atmosphere in the work, which the remainder of the first movement tries its best to dispel. Yet the premonitory brass returns several times, appearing to overcome the orchestra’s best efforts to mitigate the malignant implications of the opening. A melancholy melody by the oboe introduces the second movement, lighter though no more uplifting than the first. The third movement is pizzicato ostinato; there is no percussion in this gossamer movement, which whizzes by quietly in major keys. The fourth movement begins with a statement of a Russian folk song. The dark theme of the first movement recurs, but that bathos is balanced by a positive and major-key momentum that explodes in a triumphant finale. Despite the constrictions of life circumstances, the symphony suggests that a person may seek and find happiness—and then share that energy with others.