Written in the mid–14th century, Boccaccio’s Decameron contains a harrowing description of the devastation brought about by a plague. Corpses lie in the streets, and citizens flee, terrified, into nature. In the midst of the pandemic, people play and sing soothing songs, aiding in their survival. Boccaccio compares living during a plague to climbing a steep mountain where the summit is not clear—and imagines that when people get to the top, they see a nature that is more beautiful than they have ever seen before.
Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout is that lush vista. She explains:
The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon humankind and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, which symbolizes the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives, while nature transforms and heals herself during a time of self-isolation.
The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned Seven O’Clock Shout in spring 2020, and it was premiered on a digital program that June (its public premiere took place in May 2021 on a special concert honoring frontline workers). Coleman wrote the piece for musicians to record their parts separately, which a producer then assembled. The work has become the orchestra’s unofficial anthem, “inspired by the tireless frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brings people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes,” says Coleman.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1970, Coleman says about the area where she was raised: “You know, I grew up in Muhammad Ali’s neighborhood, the west end of Louisville. And that is about as inner-city as any inner-city can get.” Her mother introduced her to classical music while she was still in the womb, and as Coleman recounts, “She would play Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, ‘Pastoral,’ to me all the time. And that’s how it all began.” A precocious child, Coleman was already notating music in elementary school. She started formal musical studies at the age of 11, and by 14 had composed three complete symphonies. In high school, she earned the opportunity to study flute and composition at Tanglewood, and later received a double degree in composition/theory and flute performance from Boston University.
After moving to New York City, Coleman founded the Imani Winds, for which she has composed works that include her Afro-Cuban Concerto for wind quintet and orchestra, encore pieces, and arrangements of spirituals. In 2002, Chamber Music America selected Umoja—whose full orchestral version was commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra and premiered in September 2019—as one of its Top 101 Great American Works; in 2005, Coleman was nominated with Imani Winds for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album.
Coleman describes her compositional process as “very intuitive” though “never an easy one,” which requires “digging deep.” Sometimes she begins with a poem, a painting, or a biography of a unique, great person. For instance, her Portraits of Josephine, a ballet suite in eight movements for chamber ensemble, celebrates the life of entertainer Josephine Baker. Coleman is inspired by the creativity of Wayne Shorter’s improvisations and Mozart’s flute concertos, as well as the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. She has a love for Paris and mentions the paintings of Matisse as revelatory backdrops. Her compositional process begins with what she calls a “kernel,” a topic that is “impactful,” and she strives to “listen for the soul” of her idea. She has described composing for the Imani Winds as being like a “cook in the kitchen.” Among her goals while composing is creating a shared experience.
To create a shared experience during a time of isolation, Coleman used a technique called ostinato in Seven O’Clock Shout. She explains that an ostinato is
a rhythmic motif that repeats itself to generate forward motion and, in this case, groove. The ostinato patterns here are laid down by the bass section, allowing the English horn and strings to float over it, gradually building up to that moment at 7 PM when cheers, claps, clanging of pots and pans, and shouts ring through the air in cities around the world! The trumpets drive an infectious rhythm, layered with a traditional son clave rhythm, while the solo trombone boldly rings out an anthem within a traditional African call-and-response style. The entire orchestra “shouts” back in response, and the entire ensemble rallies into an anthem that embodies the struggles and triumph of humanity. The work ends in a proud anthem moment where we all come together with grateful hearts to acknowledge that we have survived yet another day.
Seven O’Clock Shout is a breathtaking pastoral tone poem in the tradition of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune—in Coleman’s words, “turning from a ballad to a celebration.”
—Aaron Beck
The composer perhaps too often associated with somber portrayals of the emotional turmoil of an artist under Stalinism was also one of the wittiest musicians since Joseph Haydn. “When listeners laugh at a concert of my symphonic music, I am not in the least bit shocked,” wrote Dmitri Shostakovich in a Soviet magazine in 1934. “In fact, I am pleased.” This composer’s early scores are characterized by a sardonic and effervescent humor that is as profound as it is satirical. There was frequently a weird tinge as well—the word often applied in early criticism was grotesque.
“I want to defend the right of laughter to appear in what is called ‘serious’ music,” Shostakovich wrote, touching on a truth known to great composers through the ages: that humor in art exists not just to elicit laughter, but to reveal truth. In Shostakovich, comedy and despair coexist as comfortably and intricately as they do in any music; humor is a means of coping with the unbearable. That there is a sharp edge to this humor should come as no surprise from one who embodied so completely the contradictions of living under the schizoid and unpredictable Soviet regime.
Shostakovich’s early stage works (The Nose, The Golden Age, The Bolt) dealt up ample servings of this sardonic wit, and the First Symphony of 1924–1925 has its moments of youthful zest and joie de vivre as well. But it was with the First Piano Concerto, written in summer 1933, that the composer brought the full force of his droll humor into the concert hall and which served him as an effective vehicle for his own performances as a brilliant pianist.
We must fast forward nearly a quarter-century, to 1957, for Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, written this time not to display his own keyboard artistry, but rather that of his son, Maxim, a gifted pianist who went on to become a noted conductor. Much had happened in the meantime, both in the turbulent history of the Soviet Union and the rollercoaster ride that was Shostakovich’s career. After official condemnation for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, his rehabilitation with the Fifth Symphony the following year, and yet another official rebuke in 1948, Shostakovich slowly worked his way back into the government’s good graces. With Stalin’s death in 1953, a general thaw in political oppression and the gradual rehabilitation of some intellectuals meant a less stressful and more comfortable life for the composer, who by then was the leading musician in the Soviet Union.
Shostakovich had done little in the realm of the concerto during these years. He withheld his First Violin Concerto, written for David Oistrakh, until after Stalin’s death, and composed a Concertino for Two Pianos, which Maxim first presented with a classmate in 1954. The Second Concerto was premiered on Maxim’s 19th birthday on May 10, 1957, as part of his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory. It was the last of the works Shostakovich wrote for pedagogical use by his children. Like J. S. Bach and other composers before him, he produced a variety of keyboard pieces for his two children, beginning with the Children’s Notebook, Op. 69, for his daughter, Galina (who eventually became a biologist), and various pieces for Maxim.
The youthful exuberance and Haydnesque wit found in the First Concerto, but largely absent from his orchestral compositions in the intervening years, returns in full force. Shostakovich wrote to composer Edison Denisov that the Second Concerto had “no artistic merit,” a remark that minimizes the joyous and beautiful qualities of a piece that in the end may be more cheerful, hopeful, and optimistic than various substantial works in which those qualities seemed forced or inauthentic. In any case, Shostakovich performed the concerto many times himself and made a recording of it. (As evidence of the continuing family tradition, Maxim later conducted a recording featuring as soloist his own son, Dmitri, who bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather. The two also gave The Philadelphia Orchestra premiere of the Second Concerto.)
David Rabinovich, one of Shostakovich’s early Soviet biographers, wrote about the work in 1959: “The concerto shows the composer as though his own youth had returned to him.” He goes on to state: “The tremendous evolution that has taken place in Shostakovich in the past two decades has made its imprint on this concerto. The musical idiom is incomparably simpler and clearer than in the early pianoforte works. There can be no doubt that the composer made every effort to create a concerto to which the youth will be receptive. [Compared with his earlier keyboard works, including the First Piano Concerto], the only difference is that now all these things have a more tender sound, and the former sarcasm and unkind grotesqueries have been turned into sweet and gentle playfulness.”
A solo bassoon initiates a witty neo-Classical style that soon accelerates with a military-sounding theme for piano and orchestra, complete with snare drum (Allegro). (The military mood was picked up in the movie Fantasia 2000 for a segment called “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”) The haunting second movement (Andante) seems a throwback not to earlier Shostakovich, but to the previous century. It provides a searching meditation for strings and keyboard soloist before the playful mood returns in the irrepressible, perpetual-motion finale (Allegro). Much of the piano passagework has the character of a mechanical piano student exercise, such as the notorious studies by Carl Czerny to which fledgling piano students are subjected. It was perhaps a sly way Shostakovich could make sure his son practiced!
—Paul J. Horsley / Christopher H. Gibbs
Perhaps the most versatile and original musician that America has produced, Leonard Bernstein made his career as a pianist, educator, and composer, as well as the first US-born music director of the New York Philharmonic. It was the very eclecticism of his gifts, partly, that distinguished him. “No musician of the 20th century has ranged so wide,” wrote a contemporary biographer. Bernstein’s achievement as composer—always controversial, constantly under revision—reflected this breadth. Major works for theater—such as West Side Story, On the Town, and Candide—combine the seriousness of the composer’s rigorous classical training with the energy of Broadway.
First produced in Boston in October 1956, Candide was based on Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s 1759 comedy, with supplemental lyrics by Richard Wilbur, Dorothy Parker, and others. This “comic operetta” (as its creators called it) made continuous nods to 18th-century musical and theatrical conventions, including pastiches of waltzes and gavottes, songs that are more like arias, and an overture whose structure, at least, is as “classical” as anything by Mozart or Rossini.
The story recounts the adventures of Candide, a young man who travels the world seeking confirmation of the contention of his tutor, Pangloss, that everything occurs for the best. After all manner of pain and tribulation—during which Candide concludes that his tutor is wrong—he returns home and builds a life based on honesty and realistic expectations. Bernstein’s Candide went through numerous revisions, most notably for a revival in 1973 by Harold Prince, in which score and lyrics were drastically altered to make the show more “popular,” in a conventional Broadway manner; in 1989, Bernstein prepared a concert version that combined the best of the various versions.
The dazzling overture, in any case, remained constant through these changes; a sonata form with hints of upcoming tunes, it concludes with a brisk statement of the opera’s best-known tune, the coloratura aria “Glitter and Be Gay.”
—Paul J. Horsley
Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist Iman Habibi was born in Tehran in 1985 during the Iran-Iraq War. “Unlike most other children who came to know music through nursery rhymes and dance, my childhood was filled with nationalistic music that celebrated the Islamic Revolution and glorified the war,” he wrote. “I discovered the enormous moving power of music at a very young age.”
Habibi’s father was a chemist, and his mother was an English teacher and translator; in the years after the war, they noticed their son’s fascination with a small electric keyboard they owned. After some debate, they “went against all cultural norms and wise counsel to hire me a private piano teacher.” Then as now, music education and public performances were discouraged and restricted, although not forbidden, by the Iranian government. At age 11, Habibi attended a strict Islamic middle school by day, but found a separate world in secretive piano studies on the side. For him, the classical piano repertoire offered “a fresh alternative to the Persian pop and traditional music with which I was constantly bombarded. More importantly, it was my music … I loved living with music that I felt belonged exclusively to me, and discovering it one composer at a time.”
At age 17, Habibi and his family immigrated to Canada by way of Turkey. After piano studies at the University of British Columbia, he was drawn increasingly toward composition, earning a doctorate in 2017 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Evan Chambers, Michael Daugherty, and Bright Sheng. Now based in Toronto, Habibi has received commissions from The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s; has collaborated with the Vancouver and Winnipeg symphony orchestras as well as the JACK, Chiara, Del Sol, and Calidore string quartets; and has had works programmed by Carnegie Hall, the Canadian Opera Company, and Tapestry Opera.
The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned Jeder Baum spricht (Every Tree Speaks) in celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. It received its premiere on March 12, 2020, when the orchestra performed its last concert—to an empty Verizon Hall and livestreamed on Facebook—before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. The title comes from a note Beethoven jotted in a sketchbook that alludes to his famous walks through the parks and countryside around Vienna: “Almighty in the forest! I am blessed, happy in the forest! Every tree speaks through you!” (“Jeder Baum spricht durch dich!”). His biographer Maynard Solomon notes the curious inversion in the phrase: It would have been more usual, more obvious, for Beethoven to exclaim to God, “You speak through every tree!” Instead, he finds the opposite: every tree speaking through God.
Although Beethoven’s own perspective was that of Romanticism, in modern terms he might be described as an environmentalist. With this in mind, Habibi wondered how Beethoven would respond to 21st-century climate change. He describes Jeder Baum spricht as “an unsettling rhapsodic reflection on the climate catastrophe, written in dialogue with Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies.” Both pieces have ties to nature—most explicit, of course, in the “Pastoral” Symphony, but the Fifth Symphony’s opening theme was once associated with bird song (perhaps a yellowhammer) in addition to its now-famous association with fate. “I am hoping that Jeder Baum spricht can allow us to listen to these monumental works with a renewed perspective,” Habibi writes, “that is, in light of the climate crisis we live in, and the havoc we continue to wreak on the nature that inspired these classic masterpieces.”
Scored for the same instruments as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Jeder Baum spricht opens with a rising sweep that culminates in an angular, cut-off climax. “The piece shifts focus rapidly,” Habibi describes, “and attempts to achieve its goal time and time again through different means, only to be faced with similar obstacles.” He develops the angular material in a section for strings and timpani marked “relentless and unsettling” before mournful horns lead to lighter, cascading pizzicatos in the strings. Fragments of longer melodic lines emerge but are thwarted, eventually reaching a passage marked “drowning in sound,” where heavy strings lie under rippling woodwinds. A shimmering clarinet comes to the fore, as the second half of the piece increasingly contrasts different choirs—woodwinds alone, then strings, and back again.
“Like much of Beethoven’s music, this piece begins ambiguously and unsettlingly, but offers a vision of hope towards the end,” Habibi says. “I am panicking about the climate crisis, but at the same time I want to convey a message of hope, one that can drive our collective will towards immediate impactful change.”
—Benjamin Pesetsky
Beethoven’s Fifth did not immediately become the world’s (or even the composer’s) most famous symphony. During his lifetime, the Third—the mighty “Eroica”—was performed more often, and the second movement of the Seventh (movements were sometimes heard separately) deemed “the crown of instrumental music.” But over the course of the 19th century, the Fifth gradually came to epitomize both Beethoven’s life and musical style. It often appeared on the inaugural concerts of new orchestras, such as when The Philadelphia Orchestra first performed in November 1900. The Fifth Symphony picked up further associations in the 20th century, be they of Allied victory during the Second World War or through its frequent appearances in popular culture.
It is not hard to account for both the popularity and the representative status of the Fifth. Celebrated music critic Sir Donald Francis Tovey called it “among the least misunderstood of musical classics.” With the rise of instrumental music in the 18th century, audiences sought ways to understand individual works, to figure out their meanings. One strategy was to make connections between a piece of music and the composer’s life. In this regard, no life and body of work has proved more accommodating than Beethoven’s, whose genius, independence, eccentricities, and struggles with deafness were already well known in his own time.
In fall 1801, at age 30, Beethoven revealed the secret of his increasing hearing loss, stating in a letter that he would “seize Fate by the throat; it shall not bend or crush me completely.” It has not been difficult to relate such statements directly to his music. The struggle with “Fate” when it “knocks at the door” (as he allegedly told his assistant Anton Schindler) that happens at the beginning of the Fifth, helped endorse the favored label for the entire middle period of Beethoven’s career: heroic.
The Fifth Symphony seems to present a large-scale narrative. According to this view, a heroic life struggle is represented in the progression of emotions, from the famous opening in C minor to the triumphant C-major coda of the last movement. For Hector Berlioz, the Fifth—more than the previous four symphonies—“emanates directly and solely from the genius of Beethoven. It is his own intimate thought that is developed; and his secret sorrows, his pent-up rage, his dreams so full of melancholy oppression, his nocturnal visions and his bursts of enthusiasm furnish its entire subject, while the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and orchestral forms are there delineated with essential novelty and individuality, endowing them also with considerable power and nobility.”
Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony over the course of several years during the most productive period of his career. Among the contemporaneous works were the Fourth and Sixth symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, Mass in C Major, three “Razumovsky” string quartets, and the first two versions of his opera Fidelio. Large-scale pieces like the opera, or commissions like the Mass, interrupted his progress on the Fifth, most of which was written in 1807 and early 1808.
The symphony premiered later that year on December 22, together with the Sixth (their numbers and order reversed) at Beethoven’s famous marathon concert at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. This legendary event also included the first public performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto (the composer was soloist), two movements from the Mass in C Major, the concert aria “Ah! perfido, and the Choral Fantasy. Reports indicate that all did not go well, as the under-rehearsed musicians struggled with this demanding new music, and things fell apart during the Choral Fantasy. But inadequate performance conditions did not dampen enthusiasm for the Fifth Symphony, which was soon recognized as a masterpiece. Novelist, critic, and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote a long and influential review in which he hailed “Beethoven’s Romanticism … that tears the listener irresistibly away into the wonderful spiritual realm of the infinite.”
Another reason for the great fame and popularity of the symphony is that it exemplifies the fingerprints of Beethoven’s heroic style. One of these identifying features is its “organicism,” the notion that all four movements seem to grow from seeds sown in the opening measures. While Beethoven used the distinctive rhythmic figure of three shorts and a long in other works from this time (Tovey remarked that if this indeed represents fate knocking at the door, it was also knocking at many other doors), here it unifies the entire symphony. After the most familiar of all symphonic openings (Allegro con brio), the piece modulates to the relative-major key, and the horns announce the second theme with a fanfare that uses the “fate rhythm.” The softer, lyrical second theme, first presented by the violins, is inconspicuously accompanied in the lower strings by the rhythm. The movement features Beethoven’s characteristic building of intensity, suspense, a thrilling coda, and also mysteries. Why, for example, does the oboe have a brief unaccompanied solo cadenza near the beginning of the recapitulation? Beethoven’s innovation is not simply that this brief passage may “mean” something, but that listeners are prompted in the first place to ask themselves what it may signify.
The second movement (Andante con moto) is a rather unusual variation form in which two themes alternate, the first sweet and lyrical, the second more forceful. Beethoven combines the third and fourth movements, which are played without pause. In earlier symphonies he had already replaced the polite minuet and trio with a more vigorous scherzo and trio. In the Fifth, the Allegro scherzo begins with a soft ascending arpeggiated string theme that contrasts with a loud assertive horn motif (again using the fate rhythm). The trio section features extraordinarily difficult string writing, in fugal style, that defeated musicians in early performances. Instead of an exact return of the opening scherzo section, Beethoven recasts the thematic material in a completely new orchestration and pianissimo dynamic. The tension builds with a long pedal point—the insistent repetition of C in the timpani—that swells in an enormous crescendo directly into the fourth-movement Allegro, in which three trombones, contrabassoon, and a piccolo join in for the first time in the piece. This finale, like the first movement, is in sonata form and uses the fate rhythm in the second theme. The coda to the symphony may strike listeners today as almost too triumphantly affirmative as the music gets faster, louder, and ever more insistent. Indeed, it is difficult to divest this best-known of symphonies from all the baggage it has accumulated through two centuries, and to listen with fresh ears to the shocking power of the work and to the marvels that Beethoven introduced into the world of orchestral music.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, Aaron Beck, and/or Benjamin Pesetsky.