CLASSICS 2025/26
RESPIGHI PINES OF ROME WITH PETER OUNDJIAN
PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
PINCHAS ZUKERMAN, violin
Friday, September 19, 2025 at 7:30pm
Saturday, September 20, 2025 at 7:30pm
Sunday, September 21, 2025 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
JOAN TOWER Suite from Concerto for Orchestra
BRUCH
BEETHOVEN
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26
I. Prelude: Allegro moderato
II. Adagio
III. Finale: Allegro energico
— INTERMISSION —
Romance No. 1 in G major, Op. 40
RESPIGHI Pines of Rome
I. The Pines of the Villa Borghese
II. Pines Near a Catacomb
III. The Pines of the Janiculum
IV. The Pines of the Appian Way
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 30 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
Peter Oundjian is a dynamic presence in the conducting world with an international career leading preeminent orchestras in many of the world’s major musical centers, from New York and Seattle to Amsterdam and Berlin.
He is currently Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, where he served previously as Principal Conductor. He is also Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival (CMF), where he has continued to program and conduct concerts that delight audiences with beloved masterpieces alongside music written by living composers. Over the course of his 14-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which concluded in 2018, he reinvigorated the orchestra with acclaimed innovative programming, artistic collaborations, extensive audience growth, national and international tours and several outstanding recordings, including Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works, which garnered a Grammy nomination and a Juno Award. Under his leadership, the Symphony underwent a transformation that significantly strengthened its presence in the world.
From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, where he led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.
Oundjian was Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2008 and Artistic Director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York from 1997 to 2007. He was also the Music Director of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta from 1998-2002. Throughout his conducting career, Oundjian has appeared as guest conductor with the country’s leading orchestras, including Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and San Francisco Symphonies, among others.
In addition to his conducting duties in Colorado, during the 2024/25 season Oundjian leads subscription weeks with the Sarasota Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and has received honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
PINCHAS ZUKERMAN, violin
With a celebrated career encompassing five decades, Pinchas Zukerman reigns as one of today’s most sought after and versatile musicians - violin and viola soloist, conductor, and chamber musician. He is renowned as a virtuoso, admired for the expressive lyricism of his playing, singular beauty of tone, and impeccable musicianship, which can be heard throughout his discography of over 100 albums for which he gained two GRAMMY® awards and 21 nominations.
In the 2025/26 season, Pinchas Zukerman performs with orchestras including the Colorado Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in a special Elgar celebration, and the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall led by Lahav Shani. Pinchas Zukerman also performs a chamber concert in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall alongside Amanda Forsyth and Lahav Shani. A major tour of Japan features concerts with the ARK Philharmonic and chamber collaborations with Amanda Forsyth, Fumiaki Miura, Nobuyuki Tsujii, and others. Zukerman also solos with the Belgrade Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta and returns to Valencia and Wrocław with Sinfonia Varsovia for programs including works by Bach, Mozart, Kilar, and Dvořák. A Spanish tour with Sinfonia Varsovia brings concerts to Girona, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. Chamber appearances include recitals with pianist Shai Wosner in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and trio concerts with the Zukerman Trio in Detroit, Chicago, North Carolina, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. The season also includes engagements in Korea with the KG Philharmonic in Seoul, and the KNN Broadcasting orchestra in Busan, as well as in China with the Hangzhou Philharmonic.)
Recent highlights include performances in Vienna and Paris with the Vienna Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, and appearances with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Sinfonia Varsovia, Orquestra de Valencia, the Basque National Orchestra (Euskadiko Orkestra) and a tour of Japan with the Danish Philharmonic. Chamber concerts including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — featuring an opening night all-Haydn program — and recitals in China with pianist Shai Wosner. Zukerman returned to the Rhode Island Philharmonic, where he played and conducted works by Haydn and Beethoven. With the Zukerman Trio, he performed in Aspen, Colorado; Sonoma, California; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Sedona, Arizona; and in Orange County, California with Violins of Hope.
A devoted teacher and champion of young musicians, he has served as chair of the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music for over 30 years and has taught at prominent institutions throughout the United Kingdom, Israel, China and Canada, among others. He has served as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Artistic and Principal Education Partner since 2021, collaborating with DSO in partnership with Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts to provide intensive coaching and tutoring sessions for its music students.
As a mentor he has inspired generations of young musicians who have achieved prominence in performing, teaching, and leading roles at music festivals around the globe. Mr. Zukerman has received honorary doctorates from Brown University, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Calgary, as well as the National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan. He is a recipient of the Isaac Stern Award for Artistic Excellence in Classical Music.
JOAN TOWER (Born in 1938)
Suite from Concerto for Orchestra
Arranged by Peter Oundjian
COMPOSITION & PREMIERE OF WORK:
Joan Tower composed Concerto for Orchestra in 1991; it was premiered on May 16, 1991 by the St. Louis Symphony, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. In 2024, conductor Peter Oundjian made a shortened version of the piece titled Suite from Concerto for Orchestra, which he premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York City with the Yale Philharmonia on January 27, 2025.
CSA LAST PERFORMANCE:
This is the premiere performance by the orchestra.
INSTRUMENTATION:
Two piccolos, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings.
DURATION:
About 11 minutes.
Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, raised in South America, where her father was a mining engineer, and returned to the United States to attend Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. After finishing her professional training, she taught at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York, while also composing and performing as a pianist. Since 1972, Tower has been on the faculty of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is now Asher Edelman Professor of Music. Her many distinctions include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville, and selection as Musical America’s 2020 Composer of the Year.
Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra was composed in 1991 on a joint commission from the St. Louis Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic; Leonard Slatkin conducted the premiere in St. Louis on May 16, 1991 as well as the first performances by the other commissioning ensembles. The composer wrote, “Concerto for Orchestra begins slowly, quietly and simply, on a unison note that emerges from the depths of the orchestra. I had imagined a long and large landscape that had a feeling of space and distance. From the beginning, I wanted to convey this sense to let the listener understand that the proportions of the piece would be spacious and that the musical materials would travel a long road.
“In the Concerto for Orchestra, there are not only solos, but duos, trios and other combinations of instruments to form the structural, timbral and emotive elements of the piece. As in all my music, I am working here on motivating the structure, trying to be sensitive to how an idea reacts to or results from the previous ideas in the strongest and most natural way — a lesson I’ve learned from studying the music of Beethoven. Although technically demanding, the virtuoso sections are an integral part of the music, resulting from accumulated energy, rather than being designed purely as display elements. I thus resisted the title Concerto for Orchestra (with its connotations of Bartók, Lutosławski and Husa), and named the work only after the composing was completed, and even then reluctantly.”
In 2024, conductor Peter Oundjian arranged the Concerto for Orchestra as a suite, shortening the half-hour original while preserving the virtuoso interplay among players, the contrasts and, in Tower’s words, “the feeling of ascent…. It took a lot of courage for Peter to distill my Concerto for Orchestra into a suite. I think he actually pulled it off — and I am totally in awe of how he did it.”
MAX BRUCH (1838-1920)
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26
COMPOSITION & PREMIERE OF WORK:
Max Bruch composed the G minor Violin Concerto in 1865-1866. It was premiered on April 24, 1866, in Coblenz, with Otto von Königslöw as soloist and the composer conducting.
CSA LAST PERFORMANCE:
November 5-7, 2021, performed by violinist Paul Huang and conducted by Valentina Peleggi.
INSTRUMENTATION:
Woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
DURATION:
About 24 minutes.
Max Bruch, widely known and respected in his day as a composer, conductor and teacher, received his earliest music instruction from his mother, a noted singer and pianist. He began composing at eleven, and by fourteen had produced a symphony and a string quartet, the latter garnering a prize that allowed him to study with Karl Reinecke and Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne. His opera Die Loreley (1862) and the choral work Frithjof (1864) brought him his first public acclaim. For the next 25 years, Bruch held various posts as a choral and orchestral conductor in Cologne, Coblenz, Sondershausen, Berlin, Liverpool and Breslau; in 1883, he visited the United States to conduct concerts of his choral compositions. From 1890 to 1910, he taught composition at the Berlin Academy and received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. Though Bruch is known mainly for three famous compositions for string soloist and orchestra (G minor Concerto and Scottish Fantasy for violin, and Kol Nidrei for cello), he also composed two other violin concertos, three symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, various chamber pieces, songs, three operas and much choral music.
The G minor Violin Concerto brought Bruch his earliest and most enduring fame. He began sketching ideas for the piece in 1857, when he was a nineteen-year-old student just finishing his studies with Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne, but they only came to fruition in 1865, at the start of his two-year tenure as director of the Royal Institute for Music at Coblenz. The piece was not only Bruch’s first concerto but also his first large work for orchestra. The G minor Concerto is a work of lyrical beauty and emotional sincerity. The first movement, which Bruch called a “Prelude,” is in the nature of an extended introduction leading without pause into the slow movement. The Concerto opens with a dialogue between soloist and orchestra followed by a wide-ranging subject played by violin over a pizzicato line in the basses. A contrasting theme reaches into the instrument’s highest register. A stormy section for orchestra recalls the opening dialogue, which softens to usher in the lovely Adagio. This slow movement contains three important themes, all languorous and sweet, which are shared by soloist and orchestra. The music builds to a passionate climax before subsiding to a tranquil close. The finale begins with eighteen modulatory bars containing hints of the upcoming theme before the soloist proclaims the vibrant melody itself. A broad theme, played first by the orchestra before being taken over by the soloist, serves as the second theme. A brief development, based on the dance-like first subject, leads to the recapitulation. The coda recalls again the first theme to bring the work to a rousing close.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Romance No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra in G major, Op. 40
COMPOSITION & PREMIERE OF WORK:
Ludwig van Beethoven composed his two Romances for Violin in 1801. The premiere date is unknown.
CSA LAST PERFORMANCE:
May 3-4, 1974, performed by violinist Bernard Eichen and conducted by Brian Priestman.
INSTRUMENTATION:
The score calls for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and string.
DURATION:
About 8 minutes.
The Oxford English Dictionary, that wondrous repository of information on the history of our language, traces the word “Romance” to the early 14th century, when it came to denote the vernacular tongue of France. The entry on “Romance” continues: “A tale in [French] verse embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, especially those of the great cycles of mediaeval legend, and belonging in matter and form to the ages of knighthood.” The taste for entertaining poetry in the everyday language — as opposed to learned disquisitions in Latin — soon spread throughout Europe. By the 16th century, the term “romance” had come to include fictitious narratives in prose, and, two centuries later, was the generic name given to the incunabula of the modern novel. The elements of distant times, places and people, thickly larded with fantasy, were common to all these manifestations. “Romantic,” therefore, seemed to apply appropriately to the extravagant emotionalism that began creeping into art and music late in the 18th century (the Oxford Dictionary defines such music as “characterized by the subordination of form to theme, and by imagination and passion”), and was to become the designation for the great age to follow.
Fourteenth-century Spain produced the earliest musical Romances, sophisticated settings of long stanzaic poems. In 18th-century France, the Romance denoted a short song of melodious character. The name was taken over into French instrumental music as the designation for some lyrical pieces of sweet sentiment. It was in this sense that Mozart applied the title “Romanza” to the second movement of his D minor Piano Concerto, K. 466. As Louis Biancolli noted about the addition of such a title, “Where it is used, the purpose is to show in advance that melodic invention and lyric feeling predominate.” The two Romances for violin and orchestra by Beethoven flow from this tradition.
The Romances (Op. 40 in G and Op. 50 in F) probably date, respectively, from 1801-1802 and 1798. The G major was published in 1803; the F major, two years later. Though the Romances are simple in expression, they require a high degree of musicianship and technical proficiency from the soloist. The celebrated Russian violin pedagogue Leopold Auer wrote that they should sound like “a tender dialogue” between soloist and orchestra, “and in keeping with this colloquial style should be played with unaffected beauty of tone and expression.”
Each of the Romances is based on a hauntingly beautiful melody presented immediately by the violin, with two intervening episodes, darker in emotional coloring, separating the full and slightly embellished returns of the main theme.
OTTORINO RESPIGHI (1879-1936)
The Pines of Rome
COMPOSITION & PREMIERE OF WORK:
Ottorino Respighi began The Pines of Rome in May 1923 and completed it the following year. Bernardino Molinari conducted the premiere in Rome on December 14, 1924.
CSA LAST PERFORMANCE:
March 11-13, 2022, conducted by Jose Luis Gomez.
INSTRUMENTATION:
Piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, piano, organ, six off-stage “bucinae” or ancient Roman war trumpets ad lib (playable on flugelhorns), strings, and, in the third section, a recording of the song of a nightingale.
DURATION:
About 23 minutes.
Ottorino Respighi, born in 1879 into the family of a piano teacher in Bologna, was introduced to music by his father and progressed so rapidly that he began his professional training in violin, piano and composition at age thirteen at the city’s respected Liceo Musicale. He was granted leave from the Liceo in 1900 to play as a violist with the orchestra of the St. Petersburg Opera, and there he took lessons with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Respighi returned to Bologna the following year to complete his degree and then went to Berlin to study with Max Bruch. After spending another season in St. Petersburg, he settled in Bologna in 1903, working as a violinist and receiving his earliest notice as a composer. He was appointed to the faculty of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy in 1913 and had his first great success three years later with the tone poem The Fountains of Rome. He was appointed director of the Academy in 1923 but resigned from the position three years later to compose. Respighi toured internationally during the following years to conduct his works until a heart condition was diagnosed in 1931 and died in Rome of a heart attack on April 18, 1936; he was 56.
The Pines of Rome is the second work of Respighi’s trilogy on Roman subjects. The first was The Fountains of Rome of 1916; the last, Roman Festivals, dates from 1928. He wrote that The Pines of Rome “uses nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and visions. The centuriesold trees that dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape become testimony to the principal events in Roman life. 1. The Pines of the Villa Borghese. Children are at play in the pine grove of the Villa Borghese, dancing the Italian equivalent of Ring around the Rosy; mimicking marching soldiers and battles; twittering and shrieking like swallows at evening; and they disappear. Suddenly the scene changes to ... 2. The Pines near a Catacomb. We see the shadows of the pines, which overhang the entrance of a catacomb. From the depths rises a chant which re-echoes solemnly, like a hymn, and is then mysteriously silenced. 3. The Pines of the Janiculum. There is a thrill in the air. The full moon reveals the profile of the pines of Gianicolo’s Hill. A nightingale sings. 4. The Pines of the Appian Way. Misty dawn on the Appian Way. The tragic country is guarded by solitary pines. Indistinctly, incessantly, the rhythm of innumerable steps. To the poet’s fantasy appears a vision of past glories; trumpets blare, and the army of the Consul advances brilliantly in the grandeur of a newly risen sun toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph the Capitoline Hill.”
©2025 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
OCT 11 SAT 7:30
