InTUNE
Miller Outdoor Theatre: Romeo and Juliet + Shostakovich 5
The Houston Symphony Magazine
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Yankı Karataş
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PERFORMANCE CALENDAR
2025-26 se a son
O p e n i n g We e ken d : Val č u h a
C on du c t s St r av in s k y ’s Fi r eb i r d
S e pt e m b e r 1 9, 2 0* & 2 1
Eschenbach Conducts
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B r o a d way Me e t s H o l l y woo d
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Fri g h t f u l l y Fu n ! A H a l l owe e n
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N ove m b e r 1
Shall We Dance?
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S N o s f e r a t u: S i le n t Fil m
w i t h L i ve O r g a n
N ov e m b e r 1 6
J o u r n ey t o L i g h t : Va l č u h a
C on du c t s S h o s t a kov i c h 1 0
N ove m b e r 2 1 , 2 2 * & 2 3
Th a nk s g i v i n g We e ken d :
Tcha i kovs k y ’s P i an o
C o n c e r t o N o . 1
N ove m b e r 28 , 2 9* & 3 0
H and e l s M es si a h
S
S
D ec e m b e r 5 , 6* & 7
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Vo c t ave: It Feels Like C h r i s t m a s
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D ec e m b e r 1 3
Mariachi Sol De Mexico de José Hernández presents: José Hernández’ Merry-Achi Christmas
Dec e m b e r 15
S S Elf i n C on c e r t
D ec e m b e r 1 9, 2 0 & 2 1 B a n k o f A m e r i c a P
A N at K i n g C o l e N ew Ye a r
See our full year calendar for even more concerts! J a n u a r y 2 , 3* & 4
*Pe r f o r m a n c e li ve s t r ea m e d
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ANNA LAPWOOD
Anna's program brings together different musical worlds! We’ll hear Tchaikovsky's 'Sleeping Beauty Waltz' next to an arrangement of Robbie Williams' 'Angels,' and iconic
by
“Imaginative, open-minded and a brilliant musician, the organist and conductor Anna Lapwood is the dream ambassador for classical music.”Gramophone
Nina Astin Winkler Charitable Trust
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Appelt Family Foundation
film scores
Hans Zimmer & John Williams alongside by Einaudi and Olivia Belli.
Featured Program
MILLER OUTDOOR THEATRE:
Romeo and Juliet + Shostakovich 5
*Anna Rakitina, conductor
0:15 E. REID – Floodplain
0:21 TCHAIKOVSKY – Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy INTERMISSION
0:46 SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47
I. Moderato
II. Allegretto
III. Largo
IV. Allegro non troppo
*Houston Symphony debut
Friday, July 18
About the Music Program Insight
THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS
City of Houston through the Miller Theatre Advisory Board Guarantor
The Houston Symphony’s Miller Outdoor Theatre concerts are endowed by The Brown Foundation, Inc. in memory of Stewart and Hanni Orton
The Houston Symphony’s sound shell ceiling is made possible through the generosity of the Beauchamp Foundation and the Fondren Foundation
8:30 p.m.
This evening, the orchestra welcomes Russian conductor Anna Rakitina to Miller Outdoor Theatre for her Houston Symphony debut. A rising star who has recently made acclaimed debuts in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, Rakitina is also a champion of new music and of American composer Ellen Reid in particular.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Reid composed Floodplain in the wake of the COVID pandemic, producing a nature tone poem that is both sumptuously scored and evocatively emotional. Rakitina rounds out the program with two Russian classics. One of its composer’s first masterpieces, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy ranks among the most potent musical responses to Shakespeare’s play with its famous love theme and violent vendetta music.
Contemporaneous with Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was on the surface an attempt to appease Stalin after the Soviet dictator signed his name to a scathing review of Shostakovich’s hit opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an event which led to a ban of Shostakovich’s music at a time when other targeted artists were being murdered or deported to Siberian gulags.
Although the symphony did restore Shostakovich to the regime’s good graces, many have also heard it as a trenchant critique of the totalitarian era in which he lived. The symphony’s ending in particular—triumphant on the surface, but a symbol of oppression for many listeners— demonstrates the power of music to hold within it multiple layers of meaning. The work remains a testament to the horrors of Stalinism and warning to posterity of the dangers of authoritarian rule. —Calvin Dotsey
Program Notes
E. REID Floodplain (2022)
Ellen Reid is today widely recognized as one of the United States’ leading composers; her path to a career in music, however, was an unexpected one. Born in 1983, Reid grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her early musical experiences included piano lessons, singing in the church choir, and jamming to “an album I had, The Best of the Girl Groups Volume 1,” as she told the San Francisco Classical Voice in a 2021 interview. Her exposure to classical music increased when she moved to New York to attend college at Columbia University. “I started writing music in college. I think it is not that rare, especially for women, to start writing a little later,” she explained to New Music USA in 2019. Initially interested in the sociology of music, she began composing outside her coursework for musicals and theater. Subsequently, Reid pivoted to composition, pursuing a master’s degree at the California Institute of the Arts. She also spent time in Thailand, where encounters with Thai classical opera proved profoundly influential on her development as a composer.
Although Reid has written works in virtually all imaginable genres, perhaps at heart she is an opera composer; indeed, it was for her 2018 opera p r i s m that she won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music. In all her works, her keen dramatic instincts and love of the beauty of sound for its own sake are readily apparent.
Floodplain is no exception. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Reid began composing the work in early 2020, but progress was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. She returned to the piece about two years later. “Floodplain emerged as a wholly different work than the one I had conceived before the pandemic,” she noted in her own program note for the piece. Regarding the title, Reid notes that “A floodplain is a low-lying area of land near a river whose role changes depending on precipitation and weather—it can morph from a fertile home for grasses, plant, and animal life to a silty bed for the swollen river. In writing Floodplain, I was inspired by this landscape that is both lush and dangerous.”
With its upward-thrusting brass motifs and shimmering orchestral textures, the work’s opening firmly places it in the tradition of 19th century nature tone poems with roots in the “Forest Murmurs” from Wagner’s Siegfried. Harmonically, there are also hints of Copland’s wideopen American landscapes, although these influences are thoroughly updated with a range of contemporary techniques drawn from the postminimalist style so prevalent in recent decades.
Perhaps reflecting her theatrical bent, Reid makes use of dramatic pauses throughout the work. Peppered throughout the score are enigmatic expressive markings: the piece opens “with Vigorous Joy;” soon after, a flowing string melody is “Luminous and Gentle;” increasingly dissonant harmonies signal “an Unearthing,” which gives way to a “Fragile, Transparent” melody for woodwinds; a lush string chorale is “Committed,” then “Passionate” as more instruments join; a cello solo is “Spinning Paranoia,” which quickly becomes “Seething Rage;” after this intense passage, a violin solo is marked “From Anger
Program Notes
E. REID Floodplain (2022)
Comes Clarity;” the return of the strings are “Resurgent Brooding Thoughts,” which after a dramatic pause become “Deeper and Darker;” after a powerful climax, we reach “Something Like Peace” with tremolo strings supporting another cello solo; this gives way to “Something Like a Prayer,” diaphanous music which fades to the work’s still, quiet ending.
—Calvin Dotsey
TCHAIKOVSKY
Romeo and Juliet, OvertureFantasy (1880)
We often imagine that artistic geniuses are solitary creatures who do their best work alone, but this is not always so; in some instances, collaboration and constructive criticism prove instrumental in the genesis of a masterpiece. Such is the case with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy, one of the composer’s first mature works. We owe the piece to Mily Balakirev, the leader of a group of composers in St. Petersburg known as “the Five” that most notably included Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin. Balakirev suggested composing a piece based on Shakespeare’s play to Tchaikovsky while visiting Moscow during the summer of 1869, and Tchaikovsky took to the idea immediately; as a closeted gay man living in 19th-century Russia, it is easy to see how the classic story of forbidden love would have had parallels in his own life. Initially, however, he struggled with writer’s block. He wrote to Balakirev, “I am played out completely, and not a single tolerable little musical idea will creep into my head.”
In response, Balakirev sent him a detailed plan: a slow introduction would depict Friar Lawrence; a fast, stormy theme the vendetta between the Montagues and Capulets; a contrasting, lyrical melody would evoke the young lovers; and the ensuing development, reprise of the main themes, and coda would suggest the outline of the tragedy. Balakirev’s suggestions seemed just the stimulus Tchaikovsky needed, and Tchaikovsky produced a piece that followed Balakirev’s plan to the letter. The premiere of this first version took place in Moscow in March 1870, but remarkably, it failed to make an impression. “My overture had no success whatever here,” Tchaikovsky wrote to a friend. Balakirev urged revisions, and during the summer of 1870, Tchaikovsky made substantial changes to the Overture-Fantasy. This brought the piece much closer to what we know today, but Balakirev was still unsatisfied, writing, “I feel strongly that you need to make further revisions to the overture, and not just to wave your hand at it, and hope for the best in your future compositions.” Tchaikovsky, however, conceded, “I could cheerfully make some further revisions, but […] I have absolutely no more energy for this task.”
Only 10 years later would he return to the overture to recompose the ending. Tchaikovsky was now convinced the work was “a genuine chef d’oeuvre,” and posterity has agreed with him. —Calvin Dotsey
Program Notes
SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47 (1937)
In January 1934, Dmitri Shostakovich scored one of the biggest triumphs of his career with the premiere of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which would play to full houses in Moscow and Leningrad for two years. Then on January 26, 1936, Stalin went to see it.
Two days later, on page three of Pravda, Shostakovich found a damning, anonymous review of Lady Macbeth headlined Muddle Instead of Music, which declared that the opera “tickles the perverted tastes of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, screaming, neurotic music…” Many have speculated that the review was written by Stalin himself. Shostakovich’s denunciation occurred in the wider context of Stalin’s purges, which began in late 1934 with the elimination of Communist Party leaders whose loyalty to Stalin was questionable, but later spread to every stratum of society.
According to official Soviet records, 681,692 people would be executed as part of the purges in 1937–38 (although the real number is likely closer to one million). Among those who were executed or deported to Siberian labor camps would be a number of Shostakovich’s friends and colleagues. Performances of Shostakovich’s music soon ceased, and his income plummeted.
The crisis could not have come at a worse time, as Shostakovich and his wife were expecting the birth of their first child. With public figures disappearing every day, Shostakovich knew that to survive, he would have to compose a work that would appear to glorify the state with grandeur, heroism, and a happy ending. That work would be his Fifth Symphony.
The symphony begins with a stark motto in the strings that leads to a bleak, wandering first theme in the violins. Gradually, more instruments enter as the music transitions to a new theme, which appears above a pulsing accompaniment. Despite glimmers of warmth, this second theme extends the atmosphere of profound melancholy created by the first.
After this theme dies away, the music begins to accelerate with a new, short-short-long rhythm in the piano and pizzicato lower strings. Above it, the first theme takes on a more menacing guise in the horns.
The music becomes faster and faster, until the first theme returns as a grotesque, militaristic march. The opening motto then returns in an extended passage of terror, climaxing with a brutal, condensed form of the first theme. After this violent passage, the second theme returns as a duet between a solo flute and horn. In the coda, the music becomes weaker and weaker, ending with the haunting sound of the celesta. After a brusque opening in the cellos and basses, the second movement launches into a parody of a waltz, featuring “wrong” note harmonies, unexpected turns, and grotesque circus music.
This movement features a multiplicity of instrumental colors, and it is easy to imagine different instruments caricaturing various types from Soviet society, some sincere, some sarcastic, and some coercive. Composed in only three days, the third movement contains some of Shostakovich’s most affecting music; scholar Michael Mishra relates that, “What so moved the Leningrad audience, many of them to tears,
Program Notes
SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47 (1937)
at the premiere was this simple, naked outpouring of tragic meditation and lyricism” at a time when artistic expressions of grief were effectively banned.
Many of those in the audience would have known people who had disappeared in the purges, people whose loss they were unable to mourn publically. Featuring divisi strings, the movement slowly builds to a powerful, cathartic climax before dying away. The finale roars into being with fiery woodwind trills before a bombastic theme appears in the trombones. The first four notes of the theme were taken from a secret, unpublished song Shostakovich had recently written to words by Pushkin: “With sleepy brush the barbarian artist/The master’s painting blackens…” The notes are the same ones used to set the words “a barbarian artist,” suggesting that this theme symbolizes Stalin himself. The music races ahead relentlessly, building to a forced-celebratory theme that quickly disintegrates. This second theme then reemerges as a poignant horn solo, followed by a passage for strings that sounds choked by tears. The music becomes softer and softer until the “barbarian artist” theme returns accompanied by timpani and snare drum. The theme builds to a violent episode punctuated by blows from the bass drum. Finally, the music breaks into a hollow, D major apotheosis of the “barbarian artist” theme with pounding timpani.
The applause at the Leningrad premiere lasted more than half an hour, causing Shostakovich’s friends to caution him against taking too many bows, lest his success be seen as a demonstration. The state critics, who knew nothing of the symphony’s connection to Pushkin’s poem, hailed the symphony as “A work of such philosophical depth and emotional force [as] could only be created here in the USSR.” Shostakovich had given them their forced happy ending, and he was back in the party’s good graces—for the time being. —Calvin Dotsey
Program Bios
Anna Rakitina , conductor
Anna Rakitina has firmly established herself as one of the most sought-after conductors of her generation following a series of highly acclaimed appearances with Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras as well as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Tonkünstler-Orchester, Swedish
Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra.
The 2024–25 Season saw Rakitina make debuts with City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Sønderjyllands Symfoniorkester, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, and North Carolina Symphony. In May 2025, as part of the Leipzig Shostakovich Festival, she conducted a specially Radio Symphony Orchestra, and
Program Bios
assembled festival orchestra consisting of young musicians from the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Mendelssohn Orchestra Academy, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and students from the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig. She also appears with many other European orchestras this season.
Rakitina regularly collaborates with soloists including Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Inon Barnatan, Joshua Bell, Renaud Capuçon, Augustin Hadelich, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, Gil Shaham, Christian
Tetzlaff, and Alisa Weilerstein. She continues to champion music by today’s composers.
Rakitina was Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2019 to 2023, only the second woman in the orchestra’s history to hold the position. In 2025, she received the prestigious European Cultural Award in recognition of her unique talent. Sept. 12 Miller Outdoor Theatre
VALČUHA CONDUCTS WEST SIDE STORY
Houston Symphony Music Director Juraj Valčuha makes his first ever appearance at Miller Outdoor Theatre!
Presenting Sponsor
Juraj Valčuha, Music Director