Program Notes: Opening Night of the 2026/2027 Season

PÉTROUCHKA BY IGOR STRAVINSKY

Whirling patterns in the winds and horns open the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka (or Pétrouchka). A solo flute enters with a skipping melody, trading tunes with upper strings. In this first movement, the music is based on a mixture of folk tunes and the sound of the yelling of Russian street-hawkers, an auspicious start to Russia’s famous Shrovetide Fair, all chaos and color.

Stravinsky became a smash international success nearly overnight in 1910 with The Firebird ballet, premiered by the Ballets Russes. When he was commissioned to write a new work for the ballet the following season, Stravinsky, then 28, first proposed The Rite of Spring, but he instead embarked on a palate-cleansing lighter work for piano and orchestra. When the Ballets Russes’ founder and impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, visited the composer some months later, he was surprised to find Stravinsky working on this altogether different piece than the Rite. (Stravinsky would later finish The Rite of Spring, which premiered in 1913, the third in a remarkably successful series of ballets.)

Still, Diaghilev recognized the new work’s potential and rolled with the surprise, collaborating with Stravinsky to evolve the setting of the puppet Petrushka, the male half of the Russian iteration of the Punch and Judy puppet duo. Petrushka is a trickster and a rebel, and he typically dies or is dragged to hell at the end of the plays he features in.

With this decided, Stravinsky musically illustrates the following tale: the Charlatan brings three puppets to life at the Shrovetide Fair, Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Moor. Petrushka loves the Ballerina, but she rejects him for the Moor. Petrushka challenges the Moor, and the latter puppet kills Petrushka, whose ghost rises, shakes his fist at the Charlatan, and dies a second time.

The original ballet lasts about 35 minutes, filled with lively folk tunes and dance music. (Stravinsky also extracted a 16-minute concert suite from the work.) The snare drum heralds changes in scenes, and in the end the music fades as the Charlatan flees, terrified, from Petrushka’s ghost, and the music dies away with the sound of plucked strings.

NEW WORLD A’COMIN BY EDWARD KENNEDY “DUKE” ELLINGTON

This work is neither a traditional concerto nor a simple collection of blues tunes but something in between. In 1943, Duke Ellington, one of the great pianists, composers, and bandleaders of the 20th century, was championing jazz in spaces where it wasn’t fully welcome yet. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in January of that year with Black, Brown, and Beige to mixed reviews from critics and audiences, but ticket sales were strong, and he was invited back to perform another concert later that same year. It was on his second visit in November that he included New World A-Comin’ on the program, a work for piano and jazz orchestra.

The work now exists in several different versions, including for solo piano, piano and band, and piano and symphony orchestra. It takes its title from a book about the African American experience by the same title by Roi Ottley, with Ellington writing later, “I visualized this new world as a place in the distant future where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no non-believers, where love was unconditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God,” in response to Ottley’s text.

New World A-Comin’ is a rhapsody that explores a variety of tunes and moods in a single movement. After an initial orchestral introduction, the piano enters with a little freeform cadenza and then introduces the first theme, a gentle, swinging affair. The orchestra comments on these themes and restates them at times, offering its own flair. It is somewhat analogous to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in that it is a showpiece for the pianist, but it is truer to the jazz idioms it incorporates than Gershwin was. Its premiere was a success, and Ellington would make frequent returns to Carnegie Hall for years thereafter, introducing new works and continuing to insist that jazz be taken seriously as a concert genre rather than being relegated to dance or club music.

Ellington’s work paved a way forward for the genre with these performances and in other great halls around the world, which continued to grow in stature and cultural prominence. A musician known for his exceptional courtesy, charm, and wit, Ellington is now considered one of the most influential figures in American music. Many of his jazz tunes are still played as standards, and he received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. He was generous with credit to his collaborators and a natural diplomat. In recent years, orchestras have increasingly programmed his concert works as their reputation and stature have continued to grow.

PIANO CONCERTO IN G MAJOR BY MAURICE RAVEL

The French composer Maurice Ravel, an excellent pianist himself, wrote two concertos for the instrument simultaneously. They couldn’t be more different; One was a serious work for a pianist’s left hand only, as it had been commissioned by a concert pianist who had lost an arm in WWI. The other, the work at hand, is a sparkling lighthearted affair, in which Ravel aims to delight and entertain, weaving French traditional dance elements with classical forms and some jazz-tinged harmonies.

Ravel himself described the G Major concerto as follows:

My only wish… was to write a genuine concerto, that is, a brilliant work, clearly highlighting the soloist’s virtuosity, without seeking to show profundity. As a model, I took two musicians who, in my opinion, best illustrated this type of composition: Mozart and Saint-Saëns. This is why the concerto, which I originally thought of entitling Divertissement, contains the three customary parts: the initial Allegro, a compact classical structure, is followed by an Adagio, in which I wanted to render particular homage to ‘scholasticism,’ and in which I attempted to write as well as I could; to conclude, a lively movement in Rondo form, likewise conceived in accordance with the most immutable traditions.

The first movement begins with a snap; the piano ponders with arpeggios as the piccolo introduces the first tune, a merry, skipping affair. The trumpet gives a lively take on the melody before the piano darkens the mood with a slower, schmaltzy passage. These two disparate passages repeat and blend and blur over the course of the movement. “In order not to needlessly weigh down the orchestral texture, I called for a reduced orchestra: the usual strings are joined only by one flute, piccolo, oboe, cor anglais [English horn], two bassoons, two horns, one trumpet and one trombone,” Ravel wrote.

The slower second movement begins with a slow, waltz-like tune in the piano alone. (“That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”) It is pensive — perhaps a touch nostalgic — and achingly beautiful. The solo continues for several minutes before strings enter to shade in the texture and woodwinds enter with little solos, passing fragments of the melody to one another. Later, the strings give their own version of the tune.

And then, a return to the brilliance of the opening with a rondo, where a main tune recurs throughout the movement. It is also written as a “perpetuum mobile,” meaning that there are very few pauses from the relentless flow of notes in both piano and orchestra. There are moments of pathos in the middle section before Ravel caps off his concerto with a grand race to the finale.

Ravel, a short, slender fellow, dreamed of being a pilot before turning to composition. When World War I swept through Europe, he tried to enlist, but the French Air Force rejected Ravel’s application on account of his age (he was nearly 40 when he applied) and low body weight. Still, eventually Ravel became an artillery truck driver. He named his truck “Adelaide,” and several of his works after the war reflected some kind of response to the psychological trauma of the conflict.

RHAPSODY IN BLUE BY GEORGE GERSHWIN

The news that American composer George Gershwin was to write a jazz concerto for bandleader Paul Whiteman’s upcoming all-jazz concert came as a surprise to many, including Gershwin himself.

The story is legendary in the classical music world: On January 3, 1924, Gershwin’s brother, Ira, saw in a news article that George was allegedly hard at work on a concerto that would turn into his Rhapsody in Blue. George, who was playing billiards at the time and had already turned down Whiteman’s invitation to write a piece for the concert, was understandably perplexed. He rang Whiteman up the next day to demand an explanation.

Professional concertizing being the competitive world that it was at the time, Whiteman had heard that a rival bandleader was organizing a similar concert, and he decided to announce Gershwin’s work and push his own performance date up, sweet-talking Gershwin into composing the Rhapsody for a rapid Feb. 12 premiere.

With no time to waste, Gershwin set about working on a piece that would fuse classical and jazz idioms as would become the rage in the roaring ’20s, later telling his biographer:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer… I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard — and even saw on paper — the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

The rest is history. The famous opening clarinet solo began life as a scale, but as a prank in rehearsal, clarinetist Ross Gorman slid up the scale with a bluesy wail. Gershwin loved the effect and asked him to perform it that way at every performance. After a punchy statement of the opening theme in the orchestra, the piano enters brooding and mysterious. It begins to trade virtuosic licks with the orchestra, with plenty of solo clarinet and trumpet.

Gershwin himself premiered the work, improvising some of the solo sections on the spot. At the time, the composer, only 26 years old, wasn’t confident yet in his ability to orchestrate music, to take a tune and assign harmony and melody to different instruments of the orchestra. Whiteman’s arranger, Ferde Grofé (composer of the famous Grand Canyon Suite), deserves significant credit for the work, as it’s his colorful assignments of solos that immediately captivated listeners. Grofé reorchestrated the work for a larger ensemble in 1926 and for a full symphony orchestra in 1942. It’s this last version that is still regularly heard in concert halls around the globe.

At the premiere, critics were divided, though the paper The New York World famously tipped its hat to Gershwin for making “an honest woman out of jazz.”