Prokofiev Violin Concerto

New York Philharmonic Nemanja Radulović, violin

Orchestral Series

Saturday, July 25, 2026 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

Guest conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali returns to lead the New York Phil in Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, featuring the Bravo! Vail debut of Serbian-French violinist Nemanja Radulović. Opening the program is Daniel Nelson’s Steampunk Blizzard, which the composer calls a “steam engine ballet in a storm.”

Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
Nemanja Radulović, violin

DANIEL NELSON Steampunk Blizzard
PROKOFIEV Violin Concerto No. 2
RACHMANINOFF Symphonic Dances

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Steampunk Blizzard (2016) DANIEL NELSON (b. 1965)

Daniel Nelson was born in
Maryland but raised in
Sweden, where his family
moved when he was a
child and where he still lives. After
studying composition at the Peabody
Conservatory and the University of
Chicago, he embarked on a career
that earned international recognition
even as he developed particularly
close relationships with Sweden’s
leading cultural institutions. A lifelong
fascination with machinery shaped such
of his compositions as Metallëphônic
(a tuba concerto), Analytic Tales of
Mechanical Movement (a double bass
concerto), and the chamber work
Mechanical Toys. In a similar vein,
the music of Steampunk Blizzard
begins with the indication “Play with
mechanical precision” and advises
deeper into the score “Delicately but
with clockwork accuracy” and then “Play
with metronomic exactness.”

The piece was commissioned to
open a concert that also included music
by Tchaikovsky. “At the time,” he wrote,
“I was reading The Time Machine by
H.G. Wells, a book which together with
Jules Verne’s novels would become a
cornerstone of the 1980s Steampunk
movement—basically, a retro-futuristic
aesthetic inspired by the industrial,
steam-powered, technology and
designs of the Victorian era. H.G. Wells’
book famously opens in a 19th-century
Parisian salon where the cultural and
scientific dignitaries of the day are
invited to witness the initial use of a
time machine. I quickly reimagined
the book’s opening; firstly, inserting
Pyotr Tchaikovsky into the fictitious
scene, and, secondly, changing the
time machine into a fantastical steam
contraption which chugs away, working
and working, and finally climaxing in
a short, unbridled, blizzard of snow.
Lastly, I asked myself, how would
Tchaikovsky have reacted musically
to this programmatic scenario? ... I did
not attempt to rewrite nor imitate the
music of Tchaikovsky, rather, I sought
to reexamine my own musical voice
through the musical prism of this great
composer.”

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 (1935) SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

In 1918, when Russia crumbled into
revolution, Sergei Prokofiev left for a life
in the West. New York would be his base
until 1923, at which point he moved to
Paris. By 1932 his steps began turning
homeward to what in the meantime
had become the Soviet Union, and in
1936 he settled in Moscow for good.
His artistic experiments continued
in the Soviet Union, but they did so
in the shadow of his more politically
acceptable efforts in Socialist-Realist
style.

He composed his Violin Concerto
No. 2 when he was on the verge of
moving back to the Soviet Union.
“Reflecting my nomadic concertizing
experience,” Prokofiev wrote in his so
called Short Autobiography of 1939-41,
“the concerto was written in the most
diverse countries: the main subject of
the first movement was written in Paris,
the first theme of the second movement
in Voronezh, the instrumentation was
completed in Baku, and the premiere
took place in December of 1935 in
Madrid.”

He had already been amassing
sketches for some vaguely imagined
violin piece when he was approached
by a group of admirers of the FrenchBelgian violinist Robert Soëtens,
who commissioned a concerto that
their friend might premiere and to
which he would maintain exclusive
performance rights for a year following.
Jascha Heifetz started programming
it immediately after Soëtens’ year
“expired,” and the concerto has been
a staple of the repertoire ever since.
Prokofiev was a master orchestrator.
His Violin Concerto No. 2 brims with
fascinating, if sometimes spare,
instrumental combinations and effects,
and he makes telling use of the
percussion section, which comprises
five instruments arranged such that
they can be handled by a single player.
Unusual for a concerto are castanets,
perhaps added to salute that the
premiere would take place in Madrid.

Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940) SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)

Through almost four decades,
Sergei Rachmaninoff distinguished
himself as a pianist, composer, and
conductor, but with the completion
of his Third Symphony, in 1936, he
appeared to reach the end of his
composing career. He had by then
finished building a villa in Switzerland
and was trying to ease into retirement.
The outbreak of World War II disrupted
such plans, however, and he returned
with his family to live in the United
States—familiar territory, since he had
largely resided in America since 1918.
He spent the summer of 1940 at an
estate on Long Island, where his final
work, the Symphonic Dances, came into
being.

He initially planned to name the
piece Fantastic Dances, or perhaps
to title the three movements “Noon,”
“Twilight,” and “Midnight”—or, as his
biographer Victor Seroff maintained,
“Morning,” “Noon,” and “Evening,”
meant as a metaphor for the three
stages of human life. Rachmaninoff
scrapped those ideas and settled
instead on the more objective name
of Symphonic Dances. The spirit of
the dance does indeed inhabit this
work, if in a sometimes mysterious or
mournful way. As he was completing
the piece he played it privately for his
old friend Michel Fokine, the one-time
choreographer of the Ballets Russes,
who signaled his interest in using it
for a ballet; regrettably, Fokine died in
1942 before he could make good on his
intention Three dances make up this
orchestral suite. The opening marchlike movement, powerful and assertive,
includes in its coda a theme from
Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony, which
had come to grief many years before—
an encoded vindication of that early
effort. A melancholy waltz follows,
and then a finale that quotes Russian
Orthodox liturgical chants and the Dies
irae from the Roman Catholic Mass for
the Dead.