Update browser for a secure Made experience

It looks like you may be using a web browser version that we don't support. Make sure you're using the most recent version of your browser, or try using of these supported browsers, to get the full Made experience: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

Donate Cart0 Español

Marin Alsop, conductor

Aristo Sham, piano Photo Credit: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Alsop & Sham

Mendelssohn Piano Concerto

The Philadelphia Orchestra Aristo Sham, piano
Orchestral Series
Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
{{ViewModel.BookingStatus}} {{ViewModel.BookingStatus}}

Van Cliburn 2025 Gold Medal Winner Aristo Sham performs Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Marin Alsop. Symphonic favorites by Haydn and Schumann complete the evening’s program.

Program Highlights

Marin Alsop, conductor
Aristo Sham, piano

HAYDN Symphony No. 59
MENDELSSOHN Piano Concerto No. 1
SCHUMANN Symphony No. 2

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Program Notes

ALSOP & SHAM: MENDELSSOHN PIANO CONCERTO

Thursday, 6 PM

Symphony No. 59 in A major, Feuer (Fire; ca. 1769) FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

In 1761, Franz Joseph Haydn took a 
step that would define the course 
of his career—and, by extension, 
the course of Western music 
history. That spring he accepted the 
post of assistant music director for 
the Esterházy princes, an immensely 
powerful family of Austro-Hungarian 
aristocrats. Five years later he was 
elevated to become full music director, 
having already distinguished himself 
at the helm of the court’s musicians. 
That year the Esterházy Court largely 
relocated from its base in Eisenstadt, 40 
miles southeast of Vienna, to the new 
Versailles-like palace they had built 
at Esterháza in Hungary a further 40 
miles distant. It was there that Haydn 
wrote and led the premiere of his 
Symphony No. 59. As he later recalled, 
in an interview with his biographer 
Georg August Griesinger: “My sovereign 
was satisfied with all my endeavors. 
I was assured of applause and, as 
head of an orchestra, was able to 
experiment, to find out what enhances 
and detracts from effect, in other words, 
to improve, add, delete, and try out. 
As I was shut off from the world, no 
one in my surroundings would vex and 
confuse me, and so I was destined for 
originality.”

It was formerly believed that the 
nickname Fire became attached to 
this piece when, in 1774, the symphony 
was thought to have been performed, 
in whole or part, as an overture or 
entr’acte for a production of a play by 
G.F.W. Grossman titled Die Feuersbrunst 
(The Fire or, perhaps a little stronger, 
The Conflagration). More recent 
scholarship has called that into deep 
question, and other evidence leans 
toward dating the symphony to 1769. 

Perhaps the nickname simply 
relates to the opening measures, where 
violins insistently repeat the tonic A—a 
curious gesture that might be seen as 
portraying leaping flames

Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 (1831) FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-47)

Felix Mendelssohn began 
sketching his G-minor Piano Concerto 
in November 1830 while visiting Rome, 
but he didn’t really focus on it until 
October 1831, when he was back 
home in Germany, at which point he 
wrote it out speedily. The work was a 
triumph. The day after the premiere, 
in Munich, he wrote to his father: “My 
concert took place yesterday and was 
much more brilliant and successful 
than I had expected. ... My concerto 
met with a long and vivid reception. 
The orchestra accompanied well and 
the work itself was really quite wild.” 
He continued with a comment that 
documents Mendelssohn’s self-effacing 
character: “The King led the applause; 
after my playing they tried to call me 
back and applauded, as it is usual 
here, but I was modest and did not 
appear again.” Further performances 
followed. In London, the critic for the 
Atheneum aptly described the concerto 
as “a dramatic scene for the piano,” 
adding that “the performance [was] an 
astonishing exhibition of piano-playing.” 
In a piano shop in Paris, Franz Liszt 
amazed Mendelssohn by sight-reading 
the piece flawlessly, from a rather 
sloppy manuscript.


This is a fleet, lightweight, and 
structurally compressed piece, 
reducing the orchestral introduction 
to the briefest quiver before the piano 
jumps in to present the first theme, 
which involved wide leaps of register 
and a spitting-out of minor scales in 
double octaves. More condensation 
occurs when, just at the movement’s 
end, trumpet and horn play an insistent 
tattoo that leads without a break to 
a dreamlike second movement. Just 
when the reverie seems to have run its 
course, the trumpet-and-horns fanfare 
again signals a seamless transition to 
the finale, a virtuosic high-wire act that 
leaves pianist and audience all but 
breathless, right through the no-hold
barred coda at the end

Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61 (1845-46) ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-56)

When Robert Schumann wrote 
his Symphony No. 2, in 1845-46, his 
creative life was imperiled. He had 
begun to show signs of serious mental 
and physical illness, and by August 
1844 he was suffering from insomnia, 
delusions, and bouts of melancholy. He 
remained unproductive through much 
of 1845, but then came the day when he 
wrote, in a letter to Felix Mendelssohn, 
“Drums and trumpets in C have been 
blaring in my head. I have no idea what 
will come of it.” What would come of it, 
we imagine, was the fanfare-like motto 
that opens the Second Symphony and 
recurs again in its Scherzo and near the 
end of its finale. Getting the notes on 
paper was not easy at first, but gradually 
he recovered the will to continue. In 
the second week of December, his 
creative juices started to flow, and in 
the space of about three weeks he 
composed the entire symphony, at 
least in its essentials. Other setbacks of 
mental illness ensued, but he somehow 
persevered. “I wrote the symphony in 
December 1845, when I was still ill,” he 
told to a friend. “I feel that people are 
bound to notice this when they hear 
the work. ... Only in the final movement 
did I begin to feel my old self again, but 
it was only after I had completed the 
whole work that I really felt any better.” 
One doubts that listeners—modern 
listeners, at any rate—would react 
to the piece in the way Schumann 
assumed. Certainly this symphony is 
not an autobiographical study in illness 
or depression. On the other hand, its 
general flavor is distinctive in a way that 
is hard to put one’s finger on: there is, 
overall, a feeling of hard-won affirmation 
and triumph

Artist Biographies

Marin Alsop

Photo Credit: Andrej Grlic

Aristo Sham

Photo Credit: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco
Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

530 S Frontage Rd E Vail, CO 81657 Venue information

Town of Vail Parking Information

Click Here to Learn More