San Francisco Symphony Podcasts

A Soviet artist's reply to just criticism"—that was the official government response to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. But was the composer really bowing to the Soviet music authorities? Or was he secretly thumbing his nose at them?

Mozart composed his Symphony No. 40 during the very productive summer of 1788, when he also completed his Symphony No. 39 and Symphony No. 41—the last symphonies he would compose.  After a series of revisions, including Mozart’s addition of clarinet parts for his friend, the clarinetist Anton Stadler, numerous versions existed (including an autograph score, with clarinets, that ended up in the hands of Johannes Brahms), confusing editors until their eventual straightening out of the parts in 1930.  Symphony No. 40 is in the key of G minor is one of only two symphonies Mozart wrote in a minor key, and according to Robert Schumann, has a “weightless, Hellenic grace.”

By the summer of 1809, Napoleon’s French forces, at war with Austria for the fourth time in eighteen years, reached the suburbs of Vienna. “Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of every sort!” wrote Beethoven to his publisher in Leipzig. But by year’s end, he had completed his Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor, a magnificent affirmation made in terrible times.

The Eroica opened the floodgates for the symphonic outpouring of the nineteenth century—for Beethoven himself, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, and the rest. The Eroica was the longest symphony ever written when it was unveiled, and listeners and critics commented widely on that fact, to the composer’s frustration. By 1807 nearly all reactions to the piece were favorable, or at least respectful, and critics were starting to make sense of its more radical elements.

Richard Strauss just wanted to give the people in the concert hall a good laugh. His tone poem Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks turned out to be one of the most sophisticated pieces of musical humor ever created.

Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4 is the classic mash-up of 19th century Americana: hymns, anthems, marches and dance tunes all woven together in a collage that is by turns messy, complicated, sentimental and chaotic, but ultimately transcendent—kind of like life itself.

Mahler's sunny Symphony No. 4 ends with a song—a child's description of heaven. But it is also full of reminders of the vastness of his musical universe.

Charles Ives' music is the archetypal "mash-up" of classic Americana. His Symphony No. 3 was inspired by the gentler, more spiritual side of the religious revivals he attended with his family as a child.

Leonard Bernstein based his Symphony No. 2 on W.H. Auden's Pulitzer Prize-winning poem The Age of Anxiety. Auden didn't think much of the work, but for Bernstein, it was very personal.

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first symphony while he was still a student, but it contains all of the elements of his mature work: the comedy and the tragedy.

Witold Lutosławski was one of the great cultural figures of 20th century Poland, and his Concerto for Orchestra– based on a simple folk tune –was one of his first great successes; perhaps because his personal history mirrored that of his native land.

Leos Janáček based his rhapsody Taras Bulba on one of the most brutal and unpleasant fictional characters ever created. But as a political symbol, it inspired him to write some of his most powerful music.

A man spots a woman across the room at a party and falls instantly in love with her. In a fit of despair over his unrequited love, he poisons himself and fantastic dreams and visions result. This is the story, inspired by his own love for the actress Harriet Smithson, that Hector Berlioz portrays in his Symphonie fantastique, premiered in 1830. Using recurring musical motifs to represent characters and brand new instrumental colors, Berlioz worked on foundations laid by Beethoven to bring music fully into the Romantic era.

Shostakovich's 10th Symphony is a vivid depiction of a life of not-so-quiet desperation in the old Soviet Union. It is as powerful a portrait of terror as has ever been composed.

Following the relative unpopularity of his Piano Concerto No. 1, Bela Bartók returned to his roots for the composition of his next piano concerto, which he called an “antithesis” to the first. This second concerto takes more of a classical form, with a sonata structure and a simpler treatment of the themes. Bartók was well-versed in this kind of writing, having himself made several student editions of music by Bach, Scarlatti, and Couperin. Despite the more traditional form, Bartók’s Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra still maintains the folk music-infused sonorities that have been a consistent hallmark of his music.

Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story received its first Broadway performances in 1957. The musical tells the story of an impossible romance between two star-crossed lovers, Tony and Maria, the Romeo and Juliet of 1950s New York City.

Inspired by a stage performance of Romeo and Juliet starring the same Harriet Smithson who inspired his epic romantic tale Symphonie fantastique, Hector Berlioz set out to compose a totally new kind of orchestra and chorus work: his Romeo et Juliette. In the forward to what he was careful not to call an opera but a “symphonie dramatique,” Berlioz tells of his decision to voice to the characters’ most intimate and sublime emotions not through words but “instrumental language, which is richer, more varied, less fixed, and by its very flow incomparably more powerful.” From the starting Allegro, depicting the warring houses of Montague and Capulet, to the Finale’s oratory oath of reconciliation, this work uses the (then new) language of programmatic orchestral writing to tell the oldest love story in the world.

In The Unanswered Question, Charles Ives tries to find the meaning of life, in a work that was decades ahead of its time.

Beethoven's first piano concerto took Vienna by storm, and set the stage for even more musical revolutions to come.

Listen to a podcast of audio program notes about the The Rite of Spring, specially prepared for the San Francisco Symphony’s Stravinsky Festival in June 2013.