In This Program
The Concert
Thursday, January 9, 2025, at 7:30pm
Friday, January 10, 2025, at 7:30pm
Saturday, January 11, 2025, at 7:30pm
James Gaffigan conducting
Missy Mazzoli
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (2014)
First San Francisco Symphony Performances
Samuel Barber
Violin Concerto, Opus 14 (1940)
Allegro
Andante
Presto in moto perpetuo
Ray Chen
Intermission
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Opus 100 (1944)
Andante
Allegro marcato
Adagio
Allegro giocoso
James Gaffigan’s appearance is supported by the Louise M. Davies Guest Conductor Fund.
These concerts are generously supported by the Ralph I. Dorfman Commissioning Fund.
Program Notes
At a Glance
Next, Ray Chen performs Samuel Barber’s lyrical and openhearted Violin Concerto, perhaps the most enduring American violin concerto yet composed. Barber gave the following summary: “[It] begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin . . . The second movement . . . is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.”
Sergei Prokofiev wrote his Fifth Symphony during the final phase of World War II. It seems to look forward to triumph and a better day, and at the height of Soviet-American cooperation in the mid-1940s, became extremely popular in both countries. Prokofiev said, “I regard the Fifth Symphony as the culmination of a long period in my creative life,” and described it as “glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit.”
Sinfonia
(for Orbiting Spheres)
Missy Mazzoli
Born: October 17, 1980, in Lansdale, Pennsylvania
Work Composed: 2014 (rev. 2016)
First SF Symphony Performances
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (2nd doubling harmonica), 2 horns (2nd doubling harmonica), 2 trumpets (2nd doubling harmonica), 2 trombones (2nd doubling harmonica), tuba, percussion (vibraphone, marimba, suspended cymbal, opera gong, lion’s roar, glockenspiel, melodica, snare drum, spring coil, and boombox), piano (doubling synthesizer), and strings
Duration: About 9 minutes
In addition to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which commissioned the first version of Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), Missy Mazzoli has written for such orchestras as the National Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Chicago Symphony, where she served a three-year residency from 2012 to 2015. In November 2024, she was named a winner of the New York Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, and in 2022 was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year.
Though she grew up in a non-musical family in small-town Pennsylvania, Mazzoli began composing around the age of 10. She later studied with David Lang at the Yale School of Music and the late Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. As an especially powerful influence, Mazzoli singles out Meredith Monk, with whom she worked during her 20s as an assistant.
Mazzoli finds musical stimulation in her omnivorous curiosity about theater, literature, the visual arts, and film. Minimalist and post-minimalist idioms inform a style uniquely her own—a style marked by unusual sonorities and timbral hybrids. The novelist and critic Garth Greenwell aptly describes Mazzoli’s work as “music of intense drama, pungently gestural.”
The Music
Several of Mazzoli’s orchestral works show a fascination with Baroque music viewed through a contemporary prism. Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) plays on the double entendre of the word “sinfonia” as referring, in a Baroque context, to an orchestral introduction (to an opera, oratorio, or suite), but also in Italian signifying the medieval string instrument we know as the hurdy-gurdy. The latter, as the composer defines it, is characterized by “constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard.”
In the opening passage, which unfolds with stately grace, the strings present two of the piece’s main gestures: swooping glissandi and a stylized ornamental turn. These ideas are delineated in overlapping phrases, while orchestral timbres begin to swirl and shift kaleidoscopically—a shimmer of harmonicas, percussion quickenings, bright accentuations from the brass. The stately music eventually returns in an eerie fadeout made alien by the addition of a pre-recorded track.
Sinfonia, writes Mazzoli, “is music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. . . a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener, only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.”
The original chamber-orchestra version was premiered in April 2014 with John Adams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The expanded full-orchestra version was premiered in February 2016 by the Boulder Philharmonic.
—Thomas May
Violin Concerto, Opus 14
Samuel Barber
Born: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania
Died: January 23, 1981, in New York
Composed: 1939–40
SF Symphony Performances: First—January 1943. Pierre Monteux conducted with Albert Spalding as soloist.
Most recent—July 2024. Earl Lee conducted with Stella Chen
as soloist.
Instrumentation: Solo violin, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, and strings
Duration: About 25 minutes
During the winter of 1938–39, it occurred to Samuel Fels, who had made a fortune from Fels Naptha soap, to commission a violin concerto for Iso Briselli, his adopted son. Briselli was born in Odessa and had come to America at the age of 12 when his teacher, the eminent Carl Flesch, went to head the violin department at the newly founded Curtis Institute. Gama Gilbert, a former Flesch student who had become a music critic at the New York Times, suggested to Fels that Barber, a good friend of his, would be the right composer for his project. And with that, the complicated and interesting story of the Barber violin concerto begins.
Fels offered Barber a $1,000 commission for a concerto, $500 down, $500 on delivery. It was Barber’s first major commission and a generous one for a composer early in his career. Trouble began when Briselli was not happy with the finale and the project was abandoned. Some, including Barber’s first biographer, Nathan Broder, have claimed that Briselli’s displeasure was due to technical shortcomings, while Briselli himself later professed that he found the third movement to be “too lightweight” compared to the rest of the concerto.
Some of what happened in 1939 is clear. Barber wanted someone to perform the controversial finale to demonstrate that it was “practical and playable,” and one afternoon Herbert Baumel, a Curtis student, was buttonholed by the pianist Ralph Berkowitz, given the pencil manuscript of the first half of the movement, told he had two hours in which to learn it and that it should be played “very fast,” and instructed to appear at the proper time, “dressed up,” in the studio of the great Josef Hofmann, then director of the school. Berkowitz would accompany him. The shotgun audition went brilliantly. In the end, Barber was permitted to keep his $500 advance (though he apparently never received the balance) and he and Briselli agreed to dissolve their collaboration.
Almost everyone who listens to the Barber concerto is struck by a split that separates the first two movements from the third. The Allegro and Andante are lyric and almost entirely lacking in brilliant passagework. The Presto is a crackling virtuoso number whose harmonic language is noticeably more biting. Briselli thought this split a blemish. He is not alone in this, but by no means will every listener agree with him on that point either.
The collapse of the Briselli scheme left Barber free to find another soloist. Having heard that Albert Spalding was looking for an attractive American concerto, Barber went to see him in August 1940 and, as he told the conductor William Strickland, “he took [it] on the spot.” Spalding was a solid, respected player, and his performance of the Barber won praise and brought the composer great acclaim.
The Music
The opening is magical. Does any other violin concerto begin with such immediacy and with so sweet and elegant a melody? A rolled G-major chord on the piano ushers it in. The melody belongs to the solo violin, and it stretches its deliciously unpredictable way through 24 measures. Barber was surely a vocal composer by nature—and here he is composing vocal music for an instrument. Two more themes appear, both introduced by the violin: one is lightly touched by melancholia, the other is grazioso e scherzando. The development begins with a surprising darkening of the scene. Toward the end, Barber gives us a hint of a cadenza.
The Andante begins with another inspired melody, this one given to the oboe. Barber lets the oboist bask in that glory, for the violin enters and occupies itself with quite different, more rhapsodic material; only at the recapitulation does the violin take the oboe theme, singing it molto espressivo low on the G string. The coda, one of Barber’s most beautiful pages, is one of the products of the revision.
The finale starts with a hushed tattoo on muted timpani; the violin enters almost immediately and plays nonstop for 102 measures in nearly unremitting up-tempo motion. In the coda, Barber increases our sense of speed both by shortening the measures and shifting from triplet eighth notes to 16ths. Three measures before the end, an arpeggio in two keys at once slews the music over to E-flat minor, about as far from the home key of A minor as you can get. For a moment the solo violin seems to embrace this wild idea, but it is cut off by a fortissimo A-minor chord that says unmistakably, that’s it!
—Michael Steinberg
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Opus 100
Sergei Prokofiev
Born: April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka, Ukraine
Died: March 5, 1953, in Moscow
Work Composed: 1944
SF Symphony Performances: First—May 1947. Pierre Monteux conducted. Most recent—January 2022. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, military drum, and bass drum), harp, piano, and strings
Duration: About 45 minutes
Unlike so much wartime music that reflects overwhelming horror and suffering, Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 is filled with warmth and measured optimism. It seems to acknowledge the heaviness of the Second World War while looking ahead to the future and recognizing what was worth fighting for. “I conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit,” Prokofiev said, “praising the free and happy man—his strength, his generosity, and the purity of his soul.”
Perhaps this optimism came from the fact that in June 1944, as Prokofiev worked on the Fifth Symphony at an artists’ retreat outside Moscow, Allied troops were landing on the Normandy beaches. By the time the symphony premiered in Moscow on January 13, 1945, Soviet troops had advanced far into German-held territory. That very night, word came that the First Ukrainian Front was breaking through enemy lines in Poland and artillery in Moscow fired a salute to their comrades’ success. A Time magazine correspondent was on the scene and later wrote:
The first distant volley shook the hall. A lank, bald-headed man in white tie and tails. . . mounted the podium and stood with bowed head, facing the Moscow State Philharmonic. He seemed to be counting off the rumbles of artillery. At the 20th, he raised his baton and began the world’s premiere of his newest symphony. The bald-headed conductor was Russia’s greatest living musician, Sergei Prokofiev.
The pianist Sviatoslav Richter was also in the audience and gave a similar description:
When Prokofiev stood up, the light seemed to pour straight down on him from somewhere up above. He stood like a monument on a pedestal. And then, when Prokofiev had taken his place on the podium and silence reigned in the hall, artillery salvos suddenly thundered forth. His baton was raised. He waited, and began only after the cannons had stopped. There was something very significant in this, something symbolic. It was as if all of us—including Prokofiev—had reached some kind of shared turning point.
And so it was. Two weeks later, the Red Army would liberate Auschwitz, and by April reach Berlin. Late that month, American and Soviet troops would link up at the Elbe River, merging the Western and Eastern Fronts and sealing the destruction of the Third Reich.
In the glow of shared victory before the onset of the Cold War, American regard for Soviet culture reached its height. In November 1945, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony received its US premiere with the Boston Symphony, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. It was a tremendous success, landing Prokofiev on the cover of Time with a detailed feature article in the pages. Koussevitzky, who had fled the Russian Revolution in 1917 and become a naturalized US citizen, cheered the Fifth Symphony as “The greatest musical event in many, many years. The greatest since Brahms and Tchaikovsky! It is magnificent! . . . Prokofiev is the greatest musician today!”
The Music
Time described Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 as “a great, brassy creation with some of the intricate efficiency and dynamic energy of a Soviet power plant and some of the pastoral lyricism of a Chekhov countryside.” Indeed, the first movement begins with that sense of pastoralism, but soon reveals a surprisingly large-scale form and orchestral lushness, working its way up to a climax of tam-tam crashes.
The second movement, Allegro marcato, is more spritely, beginning almost like clarinet-and-strings chamber music, and then gaining Scherzo velocity through propellent motor rhythms. It cuts off abruptly.
The third movement, Adagio, is reminiscent of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in its lilting, nocturnal backdrop, but with a sinewy Prokofiev twist. Contrasting ideas intervene, but when the “moonlight” accompaniment returns, it has become monstrous and unbearable. Finally it fades and moves on, dream-like.
The finale begins with the cello and basses contemplating a return of the first movement’s main melody. But then the tempo picks up and starts to shake off enormous tension: it feels like the first celebration in a long time.
—Benjamin Pesetsky
A previous version of this note appeared in the program book of the St. Louis Symphony.
About the Artists
James Gaffigan
American conductor James Gaffigan is general music director of Berlin Comic Opera and music director of the Queen Sofía Palace of the Arts in Valencia, Spain. This season he leads Berlin Comic Opera in productions of Sweeney Todd, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. At Queen Sofía Palace of the Arts, he conducts a varied season of programming including a staging of Der fliegende Holländer. Guest engagements include his debut with the NDR Elbphilharmonie and returns to the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Lucerne Symphony. In the United States, he returns to the Chicago Symphony, National Symphony, and Houston Grand Opera.
As an orchestral conductor, Gaffigan regularly works with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Detroit Symphony, among many others. In Europe, he has appeared with the London Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Norwegian Opera and Ballet, Berlin Staatskapelle, and Czech Philharmonic. A regular at the Metropolitan Opera, Bavarian State Opera, and Paris Opera, Gaffigan has also conducted the Zurich Opera, Vienna State Opera, Hamburg State Opera, Dutch National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Santa Fe Opera.
Gaffigan’s previous titles include principal guest conductor of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Opera, chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony, and assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in December 2006 and served as Associate Conductor from 2006–09.
A product of the New York City public school system, Gaffigan studied at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art before pursuing his conducting studies. He was first prize winner of the 2004 Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition.
Ray Chen
Ray Chen first came to attention with first prizes at the 2008 Yehudi Menuhin and 2009 Queen Elisabeth competitions and since then has built a profile in North America, Europe, Asia, and his native Australia. Signed in 2017 to Decca Classics, he has built on his previous three critically acclaimed albums on Sony, the first of which received an Echo Klassik award.
Chen has been profiled by The Strad and Gramophone magazines, and was listed by Forbes as one of the 30 most influential Asians under 30. He has also appeared on the television series Mozart in the Jungle; engaged in a multi-year partnership with Giorgio Armani; and performed at France’s Bastille Day, the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm, and the BBC Proms. Chen’s presence on social media makes him a classical pioneer in audience interaction, embracing the new opportunities of modern technology. His commitment to music education is paramount, inspiring the younger generation of music students with his series of self-produced videos combining comedy, education, and music.
Chen has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra Nazionale della Santa Cecilia, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Berlin Radio Symphony, and Bavarian Radio Chamber Orchestra. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in January 2011 and became a Shenson Young Artist in 2018.
Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, Chen was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music at age 15, where he studied with Aaron Rosand and was supported by Young Concert Artists. He plays the 1714 “Dolphin” Stradivarius violin, once owned by Jascha Heifetz, on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.
