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Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

The Philadelphia Orchestra Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, guitar
Orchestral Series
Friday, July 11, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
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Guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas returns to the Festival with The Philadelphia Orchestra for Rodrigo’s luminous Flamenco-inspired Fantasia para un gentilhombre (Fantasia for a Gentleman), followed by Berlioz  pilar of French romanticism, Symphonie fantastique and opens with Chabrier’s rhapsodic love-letter to Spain, España, conducted by Stéphane Denève. 

Featured Artists

Stéphane Denève

conductor

Pablo Sáinz-Villegas

guitar

Program Highlights

Stéphane Denève, conductor
Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, guitar

CHABRIER España
RODRIGO Fantasía para un gentilhombre
(Fantasia for a Gentleman)
BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique


All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Program Notes

España (Spain, 1883)

(6 minutes)

EMMANUEL CHABRIER (1841-94)

España (Spain)

Emmanuel Chabrier was one of the most beloved figures in Parisian circles of music, literature, and art in the latter half of the 19th century. When his art collection was auctioned after his death, it included seven Manets, six Monets, three Renoirs, two Sisleys, and a Cézanne—and that was just the oils! In 1882 he jotted down musical fragments he heard during a six-month vacation in Spain. That November, he wrote from Granada to his publishers: “Every evening we go to the caféconcerts where the Malaguenas, the Soledas, the Sapateado, and the Peteneras are sung. … At Málaga, the dancing became so intense that I was compelled to usher my wife away …. I can’t write about it, but I will remember it and will describe it to you. I have no need to tell you I have noted down many things: the Tango, a kind of dance in which the women imitate the pitching of a ship is the only dance in double time; all the others are in 3/4 (Seville) or in 3/8 (Málaga and Cádiz).”

The following year, after Chabrier had returned home to Paris, several of these fragments made their way into his España, which became by far his most popular concert work. It made Chabrier famous. He quickly adapted his orchestral original into a version for piano four-hands, and other arrangers produced transcriptions for further instrumental combinations, including an ambitious one for two pianos, eighthands. Many Perry Como fans may not have realized that this was the source of the melody for that singer’s 1954 hit “Hot Diggety (Dog Ziggety Boom).” Chabrier, given as he was to unbridled good spirits, probably would have been amused rather than offended by that quite nonsensical adaptation.

Fantasía para un gentilhombre (Fantasy for a Gentleman) for Guitar and Orchestra (1954)

(22 minutes)

JOAQUÍN RODRIGO (1901-99)

Fantasía para un gentilhombre (Fantasy for a Gentleman) for Guitar and Orchestra
     Villano y Ricercare
     Españoleta y Fanfare de la Caballería de Napoles (Fanfare for the Cavalry of Naples)
     Danza de las Hachas (Dance of the Axes) Canario

Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra is such a chestnut that we think of him as one of classical music’s one-hit wonders. But others of his pieces do resurface now and again, and probably the next piece in line is his Fantasía para un gentilhombre, which followed the Concierto de Aranjuez by 15 years. Rodrigo, who was blind from the age of three, actually composed an impressive quantity of orchestral music, most of it consisting of concertos—four for one or more guitars, two for cello, one each for harp, piano, and flute. That doesn’t count his several concertante works that aren’t actually titled concierto, like the Fantasía para un gentilhombre. Apart from being the non-Aranjuez work that most frequently gets an airing, it is the piece most likely to be coupled with the Concierto de Aranjuez on recordings.

In 1951, the guitarist Andrés Segovia begged Rodrigo for a new concerto; but, Rodrigo’s wife reported in her memoirs, “after the triumph of the Concierto de Aranjuez … Joaquín felt no great desire to compose another concerto. … One day, however, he told me that he had thought it over and that he would write a ‘Suite’ on themes collected by Gaspar Sanz, the famous guitarist of the court of Felipe IV. … We carefully reviewed the works of Gaspar Sanz, and together we selected the themes which would serve as basis for this new work.” The Fantasia was premiered in San Francisco in 1958, with Segovia as soloist. “True to the dimensions of the solo instrument,” one reviewer wrote, “the ‘Fantasy’ makes no big pretensions. But it makes a delightful blend of classic dignity and Spanish musical flavor. The blend is fastidious, piquant in its dance rhythms and veiled with a peculiar melancholy.”

INTERMISSION

Symphonie fantastique: Episode de la vie d’un artiste (Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist), Op. 14 (1830)

(49 minutes)

HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-69)

Symphonie fantastique: Episode de la vie d’un artiste (Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist), Op. 14
     Rêveries, Passions (Reveries, Passions):
       Largo—Allegro agitato e appassionato assai—Religiosamente
     Un Bal (A Ball): Valse: Allegro non troppo Scène aux champs (Scene in the Fields): Adagio
     Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold): Allegretto non troppo
     Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath): Larghetto—Allegro

The originality of Berlioz’s achievement in the Symphonie fantastique is simply astonishing, Even those rare listeners familiar with the excellent but neglected symphonies of his predecessors in Paris, including Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Luigi Cherubini, must acknowledge that those works do little to prepare the ear for Berlioz’s accomplishment. In the Symphonie fantastique, images are depicted with such vibrant specificity as to become downright cinematic. But Berlioz’s sense of the programmatic goes beyond the descriptive to enter the realm of the psychological—the image of a state of mind, one that is far from stable and that spills into hallucinations. (It is doubtless no coincidence that the modern Berlioz renaissance began in the acid-tripping 1960s.) The Symphonie fantastique is an extraordinary example of selfexploration and self-expression, a work of autobiography underscored by the subtitle Episode de la vie d’un artiste (Episode in the Life of an Artist).

The episode in question was carefully described in an extensive, highly detailed program note Berlioz prepared. The action is often accompanied by an idée fixe, a musical theme that surfaces throughout the piece in various transformations. It is first played by flute and violins at the beginning of the opening movement’s “Passions” section (following the “Rêveries” introduction), and pervades the ensuing material. In succeeding movements, the artist finds himself in a ballroom, where he waltzes with his beloved, and in the Alpine countryside, where memories of his beloved disturb his peace. Under the influence of a narcotic drug, he imagines himself being led to the scaffold, where he is executed for murdering his beloved, and finally to a Witches’ Sabbath convened in honor of his death, at which the idée fixe now appears as a grotesque dance heard along with a parody of the funeral chant Dies irae.