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Sibelius Symphony No. 5

New York Philharmonic Miah Persson, soprano
Orchestral Series
Saturday, July 19, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
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Santtu-Mattias Rouvali conducts the New York Philharmonic in works comprising a dramatic musical arc. Opening with Julia Wolfe’s vibrant Fountain of Youth followed by Strauss’ introspective Four Last Songs, featuring soprano Miah Persson, the concert concludes with Sibelius' triumphant Symphony No. 5.

Featured Artists

Santtu-Matias Rouvali

conductor

Miah Persson

soprano

Program Highlights

Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
Miah Persson, soprano

JULIA WOLFE Fountain of Youth
R. STRAUSS Four Last Songs
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5

Pre-Concert Talk Speaker: Jack Sheinbaum (University of Denver)
5:10 PM | Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater Lobby

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Fountain of Youth (2019)

Julia Wolfe (b. 1958)

Julia Wolfe did not initially set her sights on a musical profession, but something clicked during her undergraduate years at the University of Michigan. Soon after, she met composers Michael Gordon and David Lang, who encouraged her to apply to the Yale School of Music, their alma mater. She did and went on to earn a master’s degree there. In 1987, the three launched Bang on a Can, which evolved into one of the nation’s most vital new-music collectives. Their entrepreneurial drive also led to the founding of the publishing firm Red Poppy Music and the recording label Cantaloupe Music.

Wolfe has also gained significant recognition as a composer in her own right. Since 2009, she has served as a professor of music composition at New York University’s Steinhardt School. In 2012, she earned a Ph.D. in composition from Princeton University. Her expansive body of work often addresses social issues, and her oratorio Anthracite Fields earned the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2016, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2019 she was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year.

She composed Fountain of Youth on commission from a coalition led by Carnegie Hall and the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, an elite training orchestra for young musicians. The piece pays tribute to the youth of those performers and also to the mythical fountain of youth supposedly sought by Ponce de León in 16th-century Florida. “People have searched for the fountain of youth for thousands of years,” Wolfe writes. “The thought was that if you bathed in or drank from the fountain of youth you would be transformed, rejuvenated. My fountain of youth is music, and in this case I offer the orchestra a sassy, rhythmic, high energy swim.”

Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) (1946–48)

Richard Strauss (1864–1949)

Richard Strauss composed songs throughout his career, often tailored to the soprano voice, inspired in part by his wife, Pauline de Ahna, a soprano with whom he frequently performed in lieder recitals. Their marriage lasted 55 years, and Pauline survived her husband by just eight months, passing away in May 1950 at their home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. Nine days later, Wilhelm Furtwängler led the premiere of Strauss’s Four Last Songs in London, with Kirsten Flagstad as the soloist.

These late works are radiant products of Strauss’s twilight years. “Im Abendrot,” the first composed, was written largely in 1946 and sets a poem by the 19th-century lyricist Joseph von Eichendorff, a favorite among Romantic-era composers. The remaining three songs set poems by Hermann Hesse, whose spiritual and philosophical writings gained renewed popularity after he received the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature. Strauss completed the orchestration of the songs between May and September 1948, finishing “September” on—appropriately—September 20.

Despite confronting themes of mortality, the Four Last Songs are not morbid. Rather, they radiate peace and fulfillment—an acceptance of life’s end as a natural, even comforting, conclusion. In “Beim Schlafengehen,” the soloist reflects on surrendering the senses to sleep, an idea echoed musically by a violin solo that recalls the final trio of Der Rosenkavalier, one of Strauss’s most beloved operas. The effect is one of serene transcendence.

Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82 (1912–15, rev. 1919)

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)

The Finnish government commissioned Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony to celebrate his 50th birthday in 1915, though the work occupied him for nearly seven years—longer than any of his other symphonies. He likely began sketching the piece as early as 1912 and substantially revised it after a preliminary premiere he conducted himself in Helsinki on his birthday. Political unrest may have delayed his progress: Finland declared independence in 1917, only to fall into civil war amid the backdrop of World War I.

In 1918, Sibelius wrote in a letter: “My new works, partly sketched and planned. The Fifth Symphony in a new form—practically composed anew—I work daily … The whole—if I may say so—a spirited intensification to the end (climax). Triumphal.” He also mentioned work on what would become his Sixth and Seventh symphonies. While distinct from one another, these final three symphonies form a culmination of Sibelius’s evolution as a symphonic composer.

The Fifth Symphony opens with an ethereal sense of mystery—listeners may imagine time-lapse images of wildflowers blooming in a Nordic landscape, or recall the composer’s own note in 1914: “I begin to see dimly the mountain I shall ascend. … God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” The middle movement, marked Andante mosso, offers a meditative calm through melodic variations. The finale dazzles with its inventive structure and energy, culminating in six grandly spaced, resonant chords. Listeners are often advised not to clap prematurely—these final notes are meant to ring with climactic finality. Indeed, Sibelius’s own term for this ending—“triumphal”—is hard to dispute.

Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

530 S Frontage Rd E Vail, CO 81657 Venue information