Rouvali & Tao: Mozart & Sibelius

New York Philharmonic Conrad Tao, piano

Orchestral Series

Sunday, July 26, 2026 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

Guest conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali leads the New York Phil in a masterpiece from his native Finland—Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2—in addition to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 featuring pianist Conrad Tao and Verdi’s La forza del destino Overture.

Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
Conrad Tao, piano

VERDI La forza del destino Overture
MOZART Piano Concerto No. 23
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 2

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Overture to La forza del destino (1869) GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813-1901)

Throughout his maturity as a
composer Verdi experimented
with how to adapt the basic,
inherited materials of Italian
operas exemplified by his predecessors
Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti to evermore-intense dramatic purpose. An
important part of the process involved
the orchestra, whether by searching for
increasingly effective ways to integrate
the vocal and instrumental writing in his
operas or by achieving more convincing,
thoroughly symphonic statements in
those portions of his operas that are
given over entirely to the orchestra.

The Overture to La forza del destino
(The Force of Destiny), arguably the finest
of all Verdi’s instrumental compositions,
is an ominous eight-minute expanse that
perfectly foreshadows the snowballing
tragedy that lies ahead in its opera. This
long, dark, and convoluted tale (drawn
from a scene in Schiller’s Wallenstein’s
Camp and a play by the Spanish
playwright Angel Saavedra, Duke of
Rivas) involves the bad things that
happen to pretty much everybody when
Leonora (daughter of a marquis) and Don
Alvaro (a military up-and-comer) decide
to elope. The orchestral introduction was
initially aired in a much shorter, threeand-a-half-minute version, identified as
a mere preludio, when Verdi unveiled
this opera in 1862 in St. Petersburg, but
he expanded it some six years later for
its Italian premiere at La Scala in Milan.
The Overture incorporates some of the
opera’s magnificent melodies, but a
nervous motif—we might well call it a
“fate motif,” first heard as the theme at
the very outset—bubbles up frequently
through the texture as the episodes
unroll. The Overture doesn’t so much
encapsulate the plot that lies in store—
that would obviate the need to stay
for the opera—as present tantalizing
glimpses of some of the characters and
situations the audience will encounter.

Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K.488 (ca.1784-86) W O L F G A N G A M A D È M O Z A R T (1756-91)

Mozart probably began his A-major
Piano Concerto (K.488) in 1784, when
he was enjoying his greatest success
as a concerto soloist and accordingly
completed six piano concertos he could
introduce. The portion of the score he
wrote at that time involved an orchestra
that included a pair of oboes but no
clarinets. At some point he set his work
aside, and he didn’t finish the piece
until the winter of 1786. He signaled
its completion by entering it into his
work catalogue on March 2 of that year,
making it roughly contemporaneous
to his Piano Concertos in E-flat major
(K.482) and C minor (K.491) as well as his
opera Le nozze di Figaro (K.492, which
would be premiered on May 1). By that
time the oboes disappeared from the
score, replaced by clarinets.

In 1964, composer Olivier Messiaen
wrote commentaries on Mozart’s
“mature” piano concertos. Here’s a
sampling of what that modern master
had to say of K.488, which he called a
“resplendent masterpiece”: “Thanks to
the quality of its themes, the power of
its contrasts, the prophetic originality of
the slow movement, and the orchestral
brilliance of the finale, it stakes a place
on the very top rung of the ... piano
concertos; it is certainly the most perfect
of all, and arguably the most beautiful!”
About that astonishing slow movement,
one of the few Mozart wrote in a minor
key—near the end, the strings play quiet
broken chords and the winds provide
long-sustained tones, around which
the piano intones mournful phrases,
wide-ranging in pitch, stark in character.
Perhaps the soloist was expected to fill in
the spaces with improvised elaboration,
or perhaps the notes were intended to
stand in bleak desolation before the
mood changes for the jolly finale.

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 (1901-02) JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957)

Sibelius sketched much of his
Second Symphony during a two-month
family trip to Italy in 1901. Aspects of the
piece had already begun to form in his
mind almost two years earlier, and as he
worked on it in Italy he imagined it as a
tone poem—one involving the character
of Don Juan. As time passed, he
sacrificed the Don Juan idea for another:
a series of four tone poems based on
characters from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
But once Sibelius returned to Finland
that June, he began to recognize that
what was forming out of his sketches
was instead a full-fledged symphony—
one that would end up exhibiting an
extraordinary degree of unity among its
sections. It reached its finished form in
January 1902.

The work’s premiere marked a
signal success, and this would go on to
become the most frequently performed
of Sibelius’s seven symphonies. The
music critic Burnett James wrote:
“Though a natural melodist, Sibelius
does not invariably begin with broad
melodic statements .... More often he
works from handfuls of thematic nuclei
which by a subsequent process of
organic growth and fusion evolve into
complete structures.” One hears this at
the symphony’s outset, with the strings’
gentle riffs of repeated notes seeming
to be mere accompaniment waiting for
a theme to start above. That’s exactly
what does happen; but as the movement
progresses we understand that the
seemingly insignificant string figures
were actually fragments that would later
fall into larger formation. Some of these
seeds may take the entire symphony to
germinate and blossom: those opening
sounds of the first movement, tracing
three rising notes of a scale, will come
to full fruition in the grandly Romantic
theme of the Finale—“nuclei” converging
into a triumphant climax.