TCHAIKOVSKY VIOLIN CONCERTO WITH AUGUSTIN HADELICH
PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin
Friday, May, 30 2025 at 7:30pm
Saturday, May, 31 2025 at 7:30pm
Sunday, June, 1 2025 at 1:00pm
Boettcher Concert Hall
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
TCHAIKOVSKY
BERLIOZ
Ballade in A minor, Op. 33
Violin Concerto in D major Op. 35
I. Allegro moderato
II. Canzonetta: Andante
III. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo
— INTERMISSION —
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
I. Rêveries (Passions)
II. Un bal (A Ball)
III. Scène aux champs (Scene in the Country)
IV. Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath)
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 55 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
Saturday’S concert iS SponSored by the colorado Symphony Guild.
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
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PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
Recognized as a masterful and dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian has developed a multi-faceted portfolio as a conductor, violinist, professor and artistic advisor. He has been celebrated for his musicality, an eye towards collaboration, innovative programming, leadership and training with students and an engaging personality. Strengthening his ties to Colorado, Oundjian is now Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, which successfully pivoted to a virtual format during the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021.
Now carrying the title Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteen-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony served as a major creative force for the city of Toronto and was marked by a reimagining of the TSO’s programming, international stature, audience development, touring and a number of outstanding recordings, garnering a Grammy nomination in 2018 and a Juno award for Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works in 2019. He led the orchestra on several international tours to Europe and the USA, conducting the first performance by a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall in 2014.
From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra during which time he implemented the kind of collaborative programming that has become a staple of his directorship. Oundjian 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.
Highlights of past seasons include appearances with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Iceland Symphony, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations, support for students at Yale and Juilliard became a priority. In the 2022/2023 season, Oundjian conducted the opening weekend of Atlanta Symphony, followed by return engagements with Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas, Colorado and Toronto symphonies, as well as a visit to New World Symphony.
Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and in 2013 was awarded the school’s Sanford Medal for Distinguished Service to Music. A dedicated educator, Oundjian regularly conducts the Yale, Juilliard, Curtis and New World symphony orchestras.
An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.
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AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin
“The essence of Hadelich’s playing is beauty: reveling in the myriad ways of making a phrase come alive on the violin, delivering the musical message with no technical impediments whatsoever, and thereby revealing something from a plane beyond ours.” — WASHINGTON POST
Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he appears extensively on the world’s foremost concert stages. Hadelich has performed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, and many other eminent ensembles.
During the 2024 summer festivals season, Hadelich appeared at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Tanglewood Music Festival with the Boston Symphony, Bravo! Vail with the New York Philharmonic, Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony, Aspen Music Festival in Colorado and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in Mexico City.
Highlights of the 24/25 season include returns to the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Vienna Philharmonic, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and The Cleveland Orchestra. Hadelich will also perform with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, TonhalleOrchester Zürich, Vienna Symphony, London Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, New Zealand Symphony, Orquesta Nacional de España as well as the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Dallas and Seattle. As artist-in-residence, he will perform with the Dresden Philharmonic throughout the season, and will tour with the RSB Radio Orchestra Berlin, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, as well as the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He will perform solo violin recitals in London, Barcelona, Gothenburg, Tallinn, and Abu Dhabi, as well as duo recitals with the pianist Francesco Piemontesi in Budapest, Dresden, Katowice, Rome, and Bologna. In the summer of 2025, he will perform extensively in Asia, including engagements with the Seoul Philharmonic, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, and tour concerts in Taiwan with the Berliner Barocksolisten.
Hadelich received a GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo in 2016 for his recording of Dutilleux’s Concerto “L’Arbre des songes” with Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. A Warner Classics Artist, his most recent album “American Road Trip”, a journey through the landscape of American music with pianist Orion Weiss, was released in August 2024. Other albums for Warner Classics include Paganini’s 24 Caprices (2018); Brahms and Ligeti Violin Concertos (2019); the GRAMMY-nominated “Bohemian Tales”, which includes the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jakub Hrůša (2020); the GRAMMY
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choruses and part songs on mainly American texts. He became one of the most respected musicians of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic — New York orchestral players described him as the “Black Mahler” on his visit to that city in 1910. His premature death from pneumonia at the age of 37 in 1912 seems to have been partly a result of overwork.
Coleridge-Taylor’s music found great favor in the United States during his lifetime. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast had been performed twice in Boston by 1900, and his music was espoused by the famous African-American baritone Henry Burleigh, whose songs were an important inspiration for Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. Coleridge-Taylor’s visits to this country in 1904, 1906 and 1910 were sponsored by the Coleridge-Taylor Society, founded in 1901 in Washington, D.C. to study and perform his music and to encourage African-American musicians. President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House after a performance of Hiawatha in 1904. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was strongly drawn to America and its AfricanAmerican culture, and he was considering moving here at the time of his death.
Edward Elgar was establishing himself as England’s leading composer by the turn of the 20th century — the Enigma Variations was premiered in 1899 and The Dream of Gerontius the following year — and he was unable to accept a commission for the 1898 season of the Three Choirs Festival, held that year at Gloucester Cathedral (which hosts the annual event on a rotating basis with the cathedrals of Worcester and Hereford). In his place, Elgar recommended the 23-year-old Coleridge-Taylor, who eagerly accepted the Festival’s request in late May with the understanding that the work had to be ready for its premiere on September 12th. ColeridgeTaylor did his work well and on time, and he tried out the new Ballade in A minor at Queen’s Hall in London before the premiere and invited Elgar — “I liked it all and loved some and adored a bit,” Elgar reported to his publisher. When Coleridge-Taylor first rehearsed the work with the Festival Orchestra in Gloucester, they gave him a standing ovation. The Ballade enjoyed a similar success when he conducted its formal premiere, on September 12, 1898, and marked the beginning of his international reputation. He was commissioned to compose a Solemn Prelude for orchestra and The Soul’s Expression on sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the next two Three Choirs Festivals.
Coleridge-Taylor gave neither a referential title nor an explicit program to the Ballade, but its spirit suggested to English conductor and musicologist Geoffrey Self, author of The Hiawatha Man: The Life and Work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, “the dramatic world of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet.” The Ballade is constructed from two sweeping passages, the first, with a quick, three-note chromatic motive and a broad, heroic theme, is extroverted and agitated; the second, lyrical and tender, provides expressive contrast. These two musical types alternate, occasionally sharing motives, with the agitated music bringing the Ballade to a powerful close.
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PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. He composed his Violin Concerto in March and April 1878. It was dedicated to Adolf Brodsky, who played the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic on December 4, 1881, Hans Richter conducting. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece October 1-3, 2021 with conductor Jaime Martin and violinist Karen Gomyo.
In the summer of 1877, Tchaikovsky undertook the disastrous marriage that lasted less than three weeks and resulted in his emotional collapse and attempted suicide. He fled from Moscow to his brother Modeste in St. Petersburg, where he recovered his wits and discovered he could find solace in his work. He spent the late fall and winter completing his Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onégin. The brothers decided that travel outside Russia would be an additional balm to the composer’s spirit, and they duly installed themselves at Clarens on Lake Geneva in Switzerland soon after the first of the year.
In Clarens, Tchaikovsky had already begun work on a piano sonata when he heard the colorful Symphonie espagnole by the French composer Edouard Lalo. He was so excited by the possibilities of a work for solo violin and orchestra that he set aside the sonata and immediately began a concerto of his own. By the end of April, the composition was finished. Tchaikovsky sent the manuscript to Leopold Auer, a friend who headed the violin department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and who was also Court Violinist to the Czar, hoping to have him premiere the piece. Much to the composer’s regret, Auer returned the piece as “unplayable,” and spread that word with such authority to other violinists that it was more than three years before the Violin Concerto was heard in public. It was Adolf Brodsky, a former colleague of Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, who first accepted the challenge of this Concerto when he premiered it with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1881. It became one of the most beloved concertos in the virtuoso’s repertory.
The Concerto opens quietly with a tentative introductory tune. A foretaste of the main theme soon appears in the violins, around which a quick crescendo is mounted to usher in the soloist. After a few unaccompanied measures, the violin presents the lovely main theme above a simple string background. After an elaborated repeat of this melody, a transition follows that eventually involves the entire orchestra and gives the soloist the first opportunity for technical display. The second theme begins a long buildup leading into the development, launched with a sweeping presentation of the main theme. The soloist soon steals back the attention with breathtaking leaps and double stops. The sweeping mood returns, giving way to a flashing cadenza as a link to the recapitulation. The flute sings the main theme before the violin it takes over, and all then follows the order of the exposition. The Andante begins with a chorale for woodwinds that is heard again at the end of the movement following a soulful melody for the violin in the central episode suggesting a Gypsy fiddler. The finale is joined to the slow movement without a break. With the propulsive spirit of a dashing Cossack Trepak, the finale flies by amid the soloist’s show of agility and speed.
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death, and led to execution. The procession advances to a march that is now somber and wild, now brilliant and solemn. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for an instant, like a last lovethought before the fatal stroke. PART V: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He sees himself at the Witches’ Sabbath, amid ghosts, magicians and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, shrieks. The beloved melody reappears, but it has become an ignoble, trivial and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the Witches’ Sabbath.... She takes part in the diabolic orgy ... Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies Irae [the ancient ‘Day of Wrath’ chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead]. Witches’ Dance. The Witches’ Dance and the Dies Irae together.”
