Program Notes

Song of Orpheus

Stacy Garrop (1969–)    7 minutes (2023)

It is always a joy to compose celebratory music! When the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra approached me to write a new work, they were excited about beginning a new chapter in their organization with Matthew Kraemer, their incoming Music Director. As my new work would open their fall concert season, this would be the first piece that Mr. Kraemer performs with the musicians. A new chapter, a new leaf, a new season…a ­celebration is truly in order!

In addition to wanting to write joyous music, I was particularly inspired by the Orpheum Theater, the LPO’s longtime performance venue. Built in 1918, this Beaux-Arts style house was originally part of a chain of theaters around the country that were all named after Orpheus, a musician in ancient Greek mythology. Orpheus’ music could charm all of nature, subduing the violent tendencies of animals with the sweetness of his song.

Song of Orpheus opens with Orpheus strumming his lyre at the dawn of a new day. He begins humming while he strums, then he breaks into full voice. Nearby animals are charmed by his song and begin a lively, light-footed dance. Rocks soon fall under his charm as well and join the dance with a heavy, off-kilter step. More charmed animals join in, and soon all of creation sings in unity with Orpheus. As the celebration winds down, we hear Orpheus’ song echoing throughout the world.

Song of Orpheus was commissioned by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. As a tribute to five musicians who took part in forming the LPO in 1991 and who are still performing with the group today, you will hear solos for the piccolo, bass clarinet, viola, cello, and harp.

— Program note by Stacy Garrop.

Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622

Wolfgang Mozart (1756–1791)    29 minutes (1971)

This concerto is the last important work Mozart finished before his death. Mozart tells us that he wrote the concerto for Anton Stadler, a great virtuoso clarinet player, a close friend, and, on numerous occasions, a spirited gambling companion. Mozart enjoyed Stadler’s friendship and admired his talent, easily accepting that the latter was infinitely more ­generous and reliable than the former.

Stadler’s true debt to Mozart is one clarinetists still owe him today: pages upon pages of music as precious as any in the repertory. It’s likely that Mozart first heard Stadler play in March 1784, in a performance of his B-flat wind serenade (K. 361). By 1789, the year of the magnificent Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (K. 581), virtually every note Mozart wrote for the instrument, including the added clarinet parts for the great G minor symphony, was written for Stadler.

The concerto is one of Mozart’s most personal creations; like the final piano concerto, it’s as intimate and conversational as chamber music, rather than grand and dramatic. We can’t blame historian or playwrights for that matter for suggesting Mozart knew his time was running out, for the music implies as much. The slow movement carries an almost unnatural burden of sadness on its simple phrases; it is one of Mozart’s greatest arias and a testament to the power of music to say what words cannot. Of the two outer movements, with their endless, natural lyricism, no words are more apt than those Mozart scholar H. C. Robbins Landon remembered from Shakespeare: “The heart dances, but not for joy.

— Program note by Phillip Huscher, program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Reprinted with permission ©2025 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association

Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 “Pathetique”

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)    45 minutes (1893)

Five days after he conducted the premiere of this symphony, Tchaikovsky drank a glass of unboiled water, a careless move that year in Saint Petersburg, where countless cases of cholera had recently been reported. He died four days later.

At the time he died, Tchaikovsky was one of the great figures in music: he was at the peak of his creative powers, and he was both famous and beloved far beyond his native Russia. His death came as a shock (he was only fifty-three years old), and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his fatal illness, coupled with the tragic tone of his last ­symphony—curiously entitled Pathétique—produced a mystique about the composer’s last days that still persists today.

The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Pathétique Symphony are dramatic and mysterious, if less lurid than pulp fiction. In December 1892 Tchaikovsky abruptly decided to abandon work on a programmatic symphony in E-flat major on which he had been ­struggling for some time—“an irreversible decision,” he wrote, “and it is wonderful that I made it.” But the failure of the new symphony left Tchaikovsky despondent and directionless, and he began to fear that he was “played out, dried up,” as he put it. (“I think and I think, and I know not what to do,” he wrote to his nephew Bob Davydov, whose friendship and ­encouragement would help see him through this crisis.) Although he felt that he should give up writing “pure music, that is, symphonic or chamber music,” within two months he had begun the symphony that would prove to be his greatest—and his last.

Renewed—and relieved— by the old, familiar joy of composing, Tchaikovsky wrote frantically. Within four days, the first part of the symphony was complete and the remainder precisely outlined in his head. “You cannot imagine what bliss I feel,” he wrote to Bob on February 1, 1893, “assured that my time has not yet passed and that I can still work.” The rest went smoothly, and the symphony was completed, without setbacks, by the end of August.

The score itself, though perhaps dulled by familiarity, is one of Tchaikovsky’s most inspired creations. All of its true master-strokes are purely musical, not programmatic. It begins uniquely, with the sound of a very low bassoon solo over murky strings. (This slow introduction is in the “wrong” key, but eventually works its way into B minor.) The entire first movement sustains the tone, although not the tempo, of the somber opening. The soaring principal theme, to be played “tenderly, very songfully, and elastically,” is one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest melodies. (Tchaikovsky carefully directs the emotional development of this rich and expansive tune all the way down to a virtually unprecedented thread of sound, marked pppppp.) The recapitulation reorders and telescopes events so that the grand and expressive melody, now magically rescored, steals in suddenly and unexpectedly, to great effect.

The central movements are, by necessity, more relaxed. The first is a wonderful, singing, undanceable waltz, famously set in 5/4 time. (There’s a real waltz, in 3/4, in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.) The second is a brilliant, dazzlingly scored march, undercut throughout by a streak of melancholy.

The finale begins with a cry of despair, and although it eventually unveils a warm and ­consoling theme begun by the violins against the heartbeat of a horn ostinato, the mood only continues to darken, ultimately becoming threatening in its intensity. In a symphony marked by telling, uncommonly quiet gestures—and this from a composer famous for ­bombast—a single soft stroke of the tam-tam marks the point of no return. From there it is all defeat and disintegration, over a fading, ultimately faltering pulse.

— Program note by Phillip Huscher, program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Reprinted with permission ©2025 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association