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HOLST'S THE PLANETS CONDUCTED BY ALSOP
The Philadelphia OrchestraThe Philadelphia Orchestra explores our solar system in Holst’s legendary and popular work The Planets in a program that also includes Copland’s American masterpiece Appalachian Spring Suite, led by Marin Alsop.
Did you know?
Gustav Holst’s The Planets devotes one movement to each of the solar system’s constituents except Pluto, not yet discovered when the piece was written (and its classification has been problematic), and Earth, with which listeners would have been sufficiently acquainted.
Featured Artists
Marin Alsop
Catherine Sailer
Marin Alsop
conductor
One of the foremost conductors of our time, Marin Alsop represents a powerful and inspiring voice. Convinced that music has the power to change lives, she is internationally recognized for her innovative approach to programming and audience development, deep commitment to education, and championing of music’s importance in the world. The first woman to serve as the head of a major orchestra in the United States, South America, Austria and Britain, she is, as the New York Times put it, not only “a formidable musician and a powerful communicator” but also “a conductor with a vision.”
The 2023-24 season marks Alsop’s fifth as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which she leads at Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus, as well as on recordings, broadcasts, and international tours; her first as artistic director & chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony; and her first as principal guest conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. In fall 2024, she begins an additional three-season term as principal guest conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Meanwhile she also holds positions as chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival, where she curates and conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual summer residency, and as the first music director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) at the University of Maryland, where she launched a new academy for young conductors and leads the NOI+F Philharmonic each June.
A full decade after becoming the first female conductor of London’s Last Night of the Proms, Alsop makes history again in September 2023, as both the first woman and the first American to guest conduct three Last Nights in the festival’s 128-year history. In spring 2024, she made her company debut at the Metropolitan Opera, leading John Adams’s oratorio El Niño in a fully staged new production starring Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines. Other 2023-24 highlights include a new production of Bernstein’s Candide with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, an all-American program to inaugurate her four-season Philharmonia appointment, Penderecki’s seldom-heard opera The Black Mask with the Polish National Radio Symphony and returns to the podiums of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
In 2021, Alsop assumed the title of music director laureate and OrchKids founder of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which she continues to conduct each season. During her outstanding 14-year tenure as its music director, she led the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, released multiple award-winning recordings, and conducted more than two dozen world premieres, as well as founding OrchKids, its groundbreaking music education program for Baltimore’s most disadvantaged youth. In 2019, after seven years as music director, Alsop became conductor of honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), with which she continues to undertake major projects each season.
Deeply committed to new music, she was music director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years, leading 174 premieres. Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestras, and regularly guest conducts such major international ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and Orchestre de Paris, besides leading the La Scala Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and others. In collaboration with YouTube and Google Arts & Culture, she spearheaded the “Global Ode to Joy”, a crowd-sourced video project to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020.
Recognized with BBC Music “Album of the Year” and Emmy nominations in addition to GRAMMY, Classical BRIT and Gramophone awards, Alsop’s discography comprises more than 200 titles. These include recordings for Decca, Harmonia Mundi and Sony Classical, as well as her acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Recent releases include a live account of Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus; a Kevin Puts collection with the Baltimore Symphony; and the first installment of a complete Schumann symphonic cycle for Naxos with the Vienna RSO.
The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honored with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. Amongst many other awards and academic positions, she served as both 2021-22 Harman/Eisner Artist-in-Residence of the Aspen Institute Arts Program and 2020 artist-in-residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts; is director of graduate conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute; and holds Honorary Doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School.
To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow female conductors, in 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, which was renamed in her honor as the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2020. The Conductor, a documentary about her life, debuted at New York’s 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and has subsequently been broadcast on PBS television, screened at festivals and in theaters nationwide, and recognized with the Naples International Film Festival’s 2021 Focus on the Arts Award.
Catherine Sailer
director, the Evans Choir
Catherine Sailer is director of choral studies at the University of Denver, professor of conducting, and conductor of the Lamont Chorale. She is also associate conductor of the Colorado Ballet Orchestra, music director of the Littleton Symphony Orchestra, and conductor of The Evans Choir.
Sailer has collaborated as chorus master with conductors Branwell Tovey, Matthew Halls, Ed Spanjaard, Eric Whitacre, Victor Yampolsky, Stephen Alltop, David Amram, Tan Dun, David Fanshawe, Yannick Nezet-Segun, Robert Spano, Hans Graf, Jeff Tyzick, and Marin Alsop. Other conducting credits include Milwaukee Symphony Chorus, Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, Santa Fe Symphony, Central City Opera, Beijing Symphony, National Opera of China, Cabrillo Contemporary Music Festival Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Madrigal Vocale, Rhineland-Pfalz International Choir, Shanghai International Choral League, Lunds Akademiska Kor, Vox Anima London, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, and Bravo! Vail Music Festival. Sailer conducts festivals and masterclasses all around the world, including festivals in Carnegie Hall, England, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, and China and many honor choirs and workshops across the United States.
Honors and awards include the Dale Warland Award for choral performance and Chorus America’s Robert Shaw Fellowship Award, first place in the ACDA Conducting Competition, and a special citation in the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music. Under her direction, Lamont Chorale won first place in the American Prize for choral performance and second place in the International Barenreiter Choral Competition.
Sailer received her Doctor of Music with honors in conducting from Northwestern University. Further studies were with Helmuth Rilling (Oregon Bach Festival), Leonard Slatkin (National Conducting Institute and National Symphony Orchestra), and as conducting fellow with the Dale Warland Singers, Kansas City Chorale, Chicago Symphony Chorus, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. For the American Choral Director’s Association, she served as state president, Collegiate Repertoire/Resource Chair, Conducting Competition Chair, and International Choral Exchange Program representative to China.
Program Highlights
- Marin Alsop, conductor
- The Evans Choir (Catherine Sailer, director)
REENA ESMAIL RE|Member
COPLAND Appalachian Spring
HOLST The Planets
PRE-CONCERT TALK 5:10PM - Marc Shulgold (former music critic, Rocky Mountain News), speaker
Program Notes
RE|Member (2020-21)
REENA ESMAIL ( b.1983)
RE|Member
Much of Reena Esmail’s work confronts and embraces her Indian-American heritage and seeks to create what she terms “equitable musical spaces.” In addition to her professors at Juilliard and Yale (where she earned her doctorate), she worked in India with leading Hindustani musicians. Esmail has served as artist-in-residence at the Seattle Symphony and Los Angeles Master Chorale, and as composer-in-residence for LA-based Street Symphony. She is co-artistic director of Shastra, which promotes Indian and Western musical dialogue.
She originally envisaged RE|Member as the opening piece for the Seattle Symphony’s 2020 season, a cheerful return to the concert hall following summer break. She drew inspiration from two of her favorite overtures, Mozart’s for The Marriage of Figaro and Bernstein’s for Candide. Then came Covid. “As the pandemic unraveled life as we knew it,” she says, “the ‘return’ suddenly took on much more weight.” When it was finally premiered, a year later, she viewed the work differently. “Now the piece charts the return to a world forever changed... writing the musicians back onto a stage that they left in completely uncertain circumstances, and that they are re-entering from such a wide variety of personal experiences of this time.”
She only noticed belatedly that the work’s title, RE|Member, begins with her own initials—a fortuitous signature. She meant the title to convey two meanings of the word “remember.” One sense is the re-assembling of the orchestra’s members: “The orchestra is re-membering, coalescing again after being apart. ... The second meaning of the word: that we don’t want to forget the perspectives which each of these individuals gained during this time, simply because we are back in a familiar situation. I wanted this piece to honor the experience of coming back together, infused with the wisdom of the time apart.”
Appalachian Spring Suite (1944/45)
AARON COPLAND (1900-90)
Appalachian Spring Suite
Aaron Copland and Martha Graham had flirted with collaborating as early as 1941, when Graham envisioned a ballet that might be described as Medea set in New England. When Copland didn’t show much enthusiasm, Graham’s thoughts turned instead to something imbued with the gentle spirit that had made such an impact in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town. This would be the emotional heart of Appalachian Spring. The first script Copland received from Graham began: “This is a legend of American living. It is like the bone structure, the inner frame that holds together a people.” The scenario would eventually weave several strands of American social history, all intersecting around the time of the Civil War in some generalized place in the American heartland. Eventually the setting coalesced in rural western Pennsylvania, a region well known to Graham, who had spent her childhood not far from Pittsburgh. A bride and bridegroom become acquainted, and members of their community, including a revivalist preacher, express their sentiments. The couple grows more comfortable with the ritual of daily life that lies ahead, their humility underscored by Copland’s use of the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts,” and they greet the future with serenity. The “Simple Gifts” section of Appalachian Spring is the part that has lodged most insistently in popular memory, and Copland’s variations on that melody are indeed remarkable. Nonetheless, it is a curious inclusion in the context of the final scenario. Copland later remarked, “My research evidently was not very thorough, since I did not realize that there have never been Shaker settlements in rural Pennsylvania!” The ballet was premiered in 1944, and the following year Copland extracted eight sections, connected them without interruption, and expanded the original orchestration, which used only 13 instruments, into this version for full orchestra.
INTERMISSION
The Planets, Op. 32 (1914-16)
GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934)
The Planets, Op. 32
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic
At London’s Royal College of Music, Gustav Holst studied both composition and trombone, the latter providing a skill with which he could earn a living playing in brass bands and opera orchestras. A parallel position teaching at a girls’ school exhausted him, such that he became a weekend composer. While he was spending time in Greece and Turkey during World War I, an orchestral work was germinating that would thrust him to stardom. The Planets, a set of seven self-contained orchestral “mood pictures,” has now maintained its renown for a century. Following its premiere, in 1918, Holst’s popularity became his nemesis. He was called upon to conduct performances of this and others of his works. Social engagements and press interviews ate into his precious composition time. Publishers, suspecting that his earlier pieces might suddenly prove marketable, kept him busy correcting proofs and revising works he had long since put out of his mind. He collapsed—literally: in 1923, he fell from the podium while conducting. He took steps to simplify his life, but health issues would increasingly dog him in the decade that remained. He offered this somewhat mysterious commentary about The Planets:
These pieces were suggested
by the astrological significance of
the planets. There is no program
music in them, neither have they
any connection with the deities of
classical mythology bearing the
same names. If any guide to the
music is required, the subtitle of
each piece will be found sufficient,
especially if used in a broad sense.
For instance, Jupiter brings jollity
in the ordinary sense, and also the
more ceremonial kind of rejoicing
associated with religious or national
festivities. Saturn brings not only
physical decay, but also a vision of
fulfillment. Mercury is the symbol of
mind.
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