Read below for program notes for the Classics Series concert “Gil Shaham Returns” on November 8-9, 2025. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2025.
Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a by Johannes Brahms
German composer Johannes Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn has a somewhat misleading name, as scholars think it’s unlikely that Haydn composed the tune. Brahms may have attributed it to Haydn to help popularize his piece in a sort of classical music “click bait” — ultimately, this is one of those cases where the music’s origin is less interesting than Brahms’ immortal adaptation.
What is known for a fact: Brahms, charming and funny with his friends and gruff and sarcastic with his acquaintances, encountered the tune, “Chorale St. Antoni,” as a wind ensemble composition, and he composed a set of eight variations for two pianos based on the tune. He later orchestrated the work, and this is the version most commonly played today.
The tune that forms the basis for the theme is quirky. It stretches over five bars of music instead of the customary two, three, or four, giving the music a kind of ungainly, lopsided feel, like a melody with three left feet. After an opening statement of the melody in the winds, the first variation begins and spins out a more energetic take. Tumbling strings and a tolling base to propel the music forward. Each variation highlights a different aspect of the opening theme, exploring the tune’s emotional possibilities to great effect.
The second variation switches into a minor key and is spookier, with lightning quick contrasts in volume and instrumentation. The third is the calm after the storm, an oboe solo smooth as glass winding throughout the instrument’s register before a call and response in the strings and flutes. Fourth leaps back to a darker, minor tonality again, this time, more pensive, contemplative. Still, Brahms captures the overall feel of the opening theme with its irregular five-bar phrases.
The fifth is off to the races, a gamboling, pirouetting take on the tune that puts the orchestra through its paces to exhilarating effect. Six builds further on this energy with a snappier, more militant take, lots of brass and dotted rhythms marching in lock-step before the seventh’s dreamy, pastoral lilt. Finally, eight whispers quickly, a quick chilly wind in the night, contrasted by the warmth and calm of the finale, a grander restatement of the opening theme.
Sharp-eared listeners might hear an actual Haydn quote near the end of the work, a passage taken from Haydn’s properly attributed “Clock” Symphony, before the work winds up for an enormous finale.
Violin Concerto in G-Minor, Op. 80 by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
The legend of American composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto has at times overshadowed the work itself.
Before its premiere in 1912, the sheet music was lost at sea. (Some have claimed that it went down with the Titanic — most historians think it was another vessel.) Coleridge-Taylor had to recopy much of the music from memory. This was two years after the composer asked the virtuoso violinist Maud Powell to throw his first draft “into the fire…saying that he had written an entirely new and original work, all the melodies being his own, and that it was a hundred times better than the first composition,” Powell later wrote.
Eventually, the work did make its way to the stage, but Coleridge-Taylor was not able to hear the work played live, and he passed away from pneumonia only three months after the premiere.
Still, the premiere was more or less a success, due in part to Powell’s stellar playing. A review in Musical America described the work as “fascinating, if not great music. It contains interesting melodic material and piquant rhythms, and it is gratefully written for the solo instrument. Miss Powell played it with all the consummate artistry of which she is mistress.”
The concerto opens with a grandiose orchestral statement of the first theme, tinged with melancholy and sweetness. The violin races up a scale and restates the theme, embellishing with arpeggios and trills and flourishes. The second main theme is much lighter and quicker, with the violin dialoguing cleverly with the orchestra.
Next, the slower second movement weaves impossibly long melodic lines together with an aching sense of nostalgia and delicate textures. There are moments of passion, but the movement is largely introspective and gentle.
To close, a rhythmically complex dance for violin and orchestra. It opens in a sunnier major key, trilling and prancing along, before returning to the darker minor key theme of the first movement for a moment, as though the composer couldn’t help but keep the tone from brightening too much. Still, all ends with optimism at the close.
A soft-spoken man who often worked himself to exhaustion in his brief life, Coleridge-Taylor was born to a father who was from Sierra Leone and an English mother. His father was studying medicine but returned to Africa before learning that Coleridge-Taylor’s mother was pregnant. Still, Coleridge-Taylor displayed a remarkable musical talent and attended the Royal College of Music at the age of 15.
The composer published numerous works for orchestra, chamber musicians, and voice over the course of his brief career before he passed away at the age of 37.
Scherzo for Orchestra by Dylan Hall
The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra holds a national composition contest each year for student musicians between the ages of 13 and 18. Finalists are selected by a panel of judges, who then select three orchestral works and three chamber music works as the winners. The winners in the orchestral division each win $1,000.
Dylan Hall, a high school musician in Albany, CA., competed in 2023 with his brief, humorous Scherzo for Orchestra, about which he wrote, “This symphony was opposite the standard approach to a composer’s 9th Symphony, typically the composer’s most grandiose and triumphant piece of work.”
The piece opens with a light “boom-chuck” accompaniment in the low strings and horns, before other instruments begin to tiptoe lightly above. There are quick, sudden changes in dynamics and instrumental effects like slides and surprising changes in rhythm that catch the ear off guard and propel the music forward to its cheery conclusion.
The Orlando Philharmonic gave the premiere of this work in May 2024.
Symphony: Mathis Der Maler by Paul Hindemith
In private, composer Paul Hindemith despised the Nazis. On the one hand, he was a highly revered composer writing in a modern style, a potentially valuable asset for propaganda. On the other hand, his early operas were quite “degenerate,” dealing as they did with themes of sex and lust with plenty of crunchy, dissonant tonalities. As the 1930s progressed, the Nazi government banned more and more of his music until he set sail for the U.S. in 1940.
Matthias the Painter, written during the 1930s during the Nazi’s rise to power, is likely an allegory for the composer’s personal struggle with the Nazi’s rise to power. The symphony investigates artists’ relationships with society. It is a musical depiction in three movements of a trio of paintings known as the Isenheim Altarpiece by the painter Matthias Grünewald (currently on display in France), which depicts Christ’s crucifixion and other religious images in a series of large unfolding panels.
Grünewald used his work to comment on the 16th-century German Peasant’s War, showing sharp contrasts between serfs and lords — Hindemith only agreed to work on a piece about Grünewald after the Nazi’s began their ascent. Hindemith completed the symphony in 1934, and he worked the symphonic music into a longer operatic setting.
The symphony’s first movement, “Angelic Concert,” opens serenely, pedal tones in the horns shaded and colored in by strings and woodwinds. The music begins ambling gently, a dignified melody in the brass set against rustling string scales. There are hints of unrest throughout the movement, bits of folk music mashed against more religiously tinged music.
The “Entombment” represents a panel showing Christ’s body being laid to rest in the tomb. The music is ponderous and stately, a winding melody giving voice to conflicting thoughts and emotions. Lengthy solos for flute and oboe suggest commentary of the crowd and apostles.
Finally, the “Temptations of St. Anthony,” based on a pair of Grünewalk’s Isenheim paintings showing St. Anthony being attacked by demons and encountering St. Paul the Hermit, begins torturously, trills and unstable harmonies extended to build and develop musical tension. The torment of battle is realized with a quick-stepping fast tune, punctuated by sharp jabs from the full orchestra. Later, to close, Hindemith invokes the 13th-century chant “Lauda Sion Salvatorem,” wrapping up with a series of brilliant, rapturous hallelujahs in the brass.
On arriving in the U.S., Hindemith took up a teaching position at Yale University and other institutions for more than a decade. He returned to Europe in 1956 to live in Zurich — he is buried with his wife in Switzerland.