AUGUSTIN HADELICH PLAYS SHOSTAKOVICH
New York Philharmonic Augustin Hadelich, violinFinnish guest conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali makes his Bravo! Vail debut, leading the Philharmonic in Rossini’s Semiramide Overture, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, and Shostakovich’s virtuosic Violin Concerto No. 1, performed by longtime Bravo! Vail favorite Augustin Hadelich.
Did you know?
Two works on this program illustrate Russian music culture in the 1940s: Prokofiev’s optimistic Fifth Symphony, a wartime piece from 1944, and Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a post-War effort from 1947-48, when its composer was facing vicious state sanctions.
Featured Artists
Santtu-Matias Rouvali
Augustin Hadelich
Santtu-Matias Rouvali
conductor
In the 2023-24 season Santtu-Matias Rouvali starts his third year as principal conductor of Philharmonia Orchestra and continues as chief conductor of Gothenburg Symphony. He is honorary conductor of Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra close to his home in Finland.
In August 2023, Rouvali returned to the BBC Proms with Philharmonia Orchestra, performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1 with Seong-Jin Cho and Strauss’s Aus Italien.
Rouvali continues to have regular relationships with top level orchestras across Europe, including Münchner Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, as well as returning multiple times each season to New York Philharmonic. In December 2023 he conducts Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and as Artist in Residence at the Musikverein Wien he has concerts there throughout the season with Wiener Symphoniker as well as with his orchestras in London and Gothenburg on tour.
He works with many international soloists including Bruce Liu, Lisa Batiashvili, Seong-Jin Cho, Nicola Benedetti, Nemanja Radulović, Leif Ove Andsnes, Vadim Gluzman, Christian Tetzlaff, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Gil Shaham, Baiba Skride, and Daniil Trifonov.
As well as his residency in Vienna, touring highlights of the season include a Residency in Salzburg with Gothenburg Symphony in November 2023 with music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Korngold, as well as extensive European touring with Philharmonia Orchestra with Rachmaninov, Beethoven and Shostakovich. Rouvali and Philharmonia Orchestra continue their important residencies together across the UK.
Rouvali also continues building an impressive discography. In January 2019 with Gothenburg Symphony, he released a celebrated first disc of an ambitious Sibelius cycle, pairing the Symphony No.1 with the early tone poem En saga. The album won the Gramophone Editor’s Choice award, the Choc de Classica, a prize from the German Record Critics and the prestigious French Diapason d’Or ‘Decouverte’. In February 2020 they released the second volume, which features Sibelius’ Symphony No.2 and King Christian II, which has also been immediately awarded a Choc de Classica award. The third disc — Sibelius’ Symphonies Nos. 3, 5 & Pohjola’s Daughter - was released in October 2022, awarded the Radio Classique ‘TROPHÉE’ the following month. Philharmonia Records first release – a double CD album Santtu conducts Strauss – was released in March 2023 following on from recent releases of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. In September 2023, a new series Musical Masterpieces is released on Sky Arts. It will feature Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture performed by Rouvali and Philharmonia Orchestra, opening up different aspects of the music, and sharing Rouvali’s insights and interpretation of the piece.
HarrisonParrott represents Santtu-Matias Rouvali for worldwide general management.
Augustin Hadelich
violin
Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he tours extensively around the world. He has performed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Concertgebouworkest, Orchestre National de France, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, and many others.
Augustin Hadelich’s engagements in the 2022-23 season included concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Toronto. He performs with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Wiener Symphoniker, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, São Paulo Symphony and Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
As the season’s artist-in-residence of the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Augustin Hadelich joined the orchestra on a summer festival tour to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Bonn, in addition to other festival appearances in Aspen, Lucerne, and Salzburg. He returned to the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg as its associate artist and performed on tour with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. In June 2023, he joined the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra on a concert tour to South Korea.
Augustin Hadelich is the winner of a 2016 GRAMMY Award – “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” – for his recording of Dutilleux’s Violin Concerto, L’Arbre des songes, with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot (Seattle Symphony MEDIA). A Warner Classics Artist, his most recent release is “Recuerdos”, a Spain-themed album featuring works by Sarasate, Tarrega, Prokofiev, and Britten with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and Cristian Măcelaru. Writing about his GRAMMY-nominated 2021 release of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most prestigious newspapers, boldly stated: “Augustin Hadelich is one of the most exciting violinists in the world. This album is a total success.” Other albums for Warner Classics include “Paganini’s 24 Caprices” (2018); the Brahms and Ligeti violin concertos with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya (2019); and the GRAMMY-nominated “Bohemian Tales”, which includes the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks conducted by Jakub Hrůša (2020).
Augustin Hadelich, now an American and German citizen, was born in Italy, to German parents. He studied with Joel Smirnoff at New York’s Juilliard School. Hadelich made a significant career leap in 2006 when he won the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis. Other distinctions include an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2009); a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in the UK (2011); an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter in the UK (2017); and being voted “Instrumentalist of the Year” by the influential magazine “Musical America” (2018).
Augustin Hadelich is on the violin faculty of the Yale School of Music at Yale University. He plays violin from 1744 by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, known as “Leduc, ex Szeryng”, on loan from the Tarisio Trust.
Program Highlights
- Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
- Augustin Hadelich, violin
ROSSINI Semiramide Overture
SHOSTAKOVICH Violin Concerto No. 1
PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 5
PRE-CONCERT TALK 5:10PM - Petra Meyer-Frazier (University of Denver), speaker in the Gerald R Ford Amphitheater Lobby.
Program Notes
Semiramide Overture (1822)
GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868)
Semiramide Overture
By 1822, when Gioachino Rossini composed his opera Semiramide in the course of 33 days, all but this last of his Italian operas were behind him. He spent the 1822 season in Vienna (getting married on the way), and in late 1823 he traveled to London, where he had agreed to lead several of his operas, growing rich in the process. On the way there he had spent time in Paris, which held sway as the most glittering cultural capital of Europe. After completing his London obligations, he moved to Paris for good, composing a few more operas (in French) and then effectively retiring, at the age of 37, to live the life of a well-placed socialite and well-fed gourmand.
Semiramide falls at precisely the moment of transition when Rossini was “going international.” He composed it during the autumn of 1822, just on the heels of his visit to Vienna. The plot involves politically fraught love affairs, the threat of incest, and murders of both the regicide and matricide variety. The title character is the Queen of Babylon, sung at the premiere by Rossini’s new wife, Isabella Colbran.
The Semiramide Overture is unusual among Rossini overtures in that it incorporates some music that will occur later in the opera itself—a practice that modern listeners may assume was always standard but in fact was far from customary at that time. A few pages of skittering Allegro vivace lead to a spacious Andantino introduced by the burnished sounds of a four-part horn choir; in the opera this theme appears when subjects pledge their allegiance to the Queen. Premonitions of other moments in the action are heard in the principal theme of the later Allegro section that forms the bulk of the Overture.
Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99 (1947-48)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-75)
Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99
Nocturne: Moderato
Scherzo: Allegro
Passacaglia: Andante
Burlesque: Allegro con brio—Presto
Dmitri Shostakovich’s official approval ratings had already soared and plummeted several times when, in 1948, he was condemned along with many composer-colleagues for “formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies in music, alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes” (as the official “Zhdanov Decree” phrased it). He responded with a pathetic acknowledgement of guilt, and the next year he redeemed himself with a nationalistic oratorio that gained him a Stalin Prize.
He was working on his Violin Concerto No. 1 throughout these scary proceedings. He told his friend Isaak Glikman that every evening when he returned from the Zhdanov sessions he distracted himself by working on the Concerto’s third movement. One of his pupils asked him where he was in the score when the Zhdanov Decree was published. “He showed me the exact spot,” the student recalled. “The violin played 16th-notes before and after it. There was no change evident in the music.” Nonetheless, the whole business left Shostakovich unnerved, and the Concerto waited until 1955 to be premiered, by violinist David Oistrakh and the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting.
In March 1948, Venyamin Basner, a violinist, attended Shostakovich’s last class at the Leningrad Conservatory, during which the composer “played for us for the very first time his newly finished Violin Concerto.” He continued: “The Concerto is a relentlessly hard, intense piece for the soloist. The difficult Scherzo is followed by the Passacaglia, then comes immediately the enormous cadenza which leads without a break into the Finale. The violinist is not given the chance to pause and take breath.” Oistrakh begged him to alter the score to allow him eight measures of silence, “so at least I can wipe the sweat off my brow”—which the composer did at the outset of the finale.
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100 (1944)
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100
Andante
Allegro marcato
Adagio
Allegro giocoso
World War II was in full swing while Prokofiev worked on this symphony, during the summer of 1944, but he was sheltered from the hostilities, living in an artists’ retreat 150 miles northeast of Moscow. “I regard the Fifth Symphony as the culmination of a long period of my creative life,” he wrote shortly after its premiere. “I conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit ... praising the free and happy man—his strength, his generosity, and the purity of his soul.” The opening movement, somewhat slower than traditional symphonic first movements, conveys a sense of grandeur and heroism, followed by one of the composer’s most irrepressible scherzos. Its opening melody seems to begin in lighthearted menace and to conclude, just a few measures later, somewhere near Tin Pan Alley. The third movement is a study in elegant lyricism, though not without tragic overtones; and the finale, after reminiscing about some material alluding to the first movement, pours forth with giddy high spirits and optimistic affirmation.
It scored a huge success at its premiere, on an all-Prokofiev program that also included the Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf. Its wide-ranging but broadly optimistic spirit combined with the circumstances of wartime patriotism to create a perfect storm of enthusiasm on Soviet stages, and it wasted no time whipping up similar excitement in the United States. On November 19, 1945, a week after Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere, Prokofiev’s picture graced the cover of Time magazine. The magazine’s lengthy profile of him quoted Koussevitzky’s assessment: “[The Fifth Symphony is] the greatest musical event in many, many years. The greatest since Brahms and Tchaikovsky! It is magnificent! It is yesterday, it is today, it is tomorrow.”
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