What about the music?
An inside look with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Classical Christmas
December 3, 2026 | 7:30PM | Harrison Opera House, Norfolk – Get Tickets
December 6, 2026 | 2PM | Music & Arts Center Concert Hall, William & Mary, Williamsburg – Get Tickets
December 6, 2026 | 4PM | Music & Arts Center Concert Hall, William & Mary, Williamsburg – Get Tickets
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Colin Jacobsen, violin
Maurice Ravel: Tzigane
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Lark Ascending
Antonio Vivaldi: “Winter” from The Four Seasons
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Excerpts from The Nutcracker
Christina Courtin: Sing-Along
By Stella Feliberti
The Performers
conductor
Eric Jacobsen
Already well-established as one of classical music’s most exciting and innovative young conductors, Eric Jacobsen combines fresh interpretations of the traditional canon with cutting-edge collaborations across musical genres. Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” Eric, as both a conductor and a cellist, has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming.
Eric joined the Virginia Symphony Orchestra as Music Director in 2021, being named the twelfth music director in the orchestra’s 100+ year history. Current and recent projects include recording projects of Dvorak and Coleridge-Taylor with Gil Shaham and Rhapsody in Blue (on banjo!) with Bela Fleck.
Eric is entering his tenth season as Music Director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, as he continues to pioneer the orchestra’s programming and community engagement in new and exciting directions. The 24-25 season looks forward to concerts including An Evening with Jamie Bernstein and the World Premiere of Gabe Kahane’s clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill.
Eric is also artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, the uniquely adventurous NYC-based chamber orchestra. The ensemble, founded with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, grew out of late-night music reading parties with friends, good food and drink, and conversation. Current endeavors include a multi-year Rhapsody project as well as a residency at Carnegie Hall. Under Jacobsen’s baton, The Knights have developed an extensive recording collection, including albums with longtime collaborators Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Aaron Diehl, Gabe Kahane, and Anna Clyne.
Eric’s musical life started from a very young age surrounded by a musical family, where he discovered his love of pulling a bow across a string as a cellist. He and his brother founded the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and also performed regularly with Yo-Yo Ma as a member of Silk Road, touring around the world. This collaborative spirit and sense of music is something that Eric strives to bring to every concert and project.
A frequent guest conductor, Eric has established continuing relationships with the Colorado Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Dresden Musikfestspiele. Upcoming engagements also include concerts with Classical Tahoe and Grant Park Music Festival, and special performances with Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony and Utah Symphony.
Eric brings joy, storytelling, and a touch of humor to what he describes as “musical conversations” that delight audiences around the world, including those who do not traditionally attend classical music concerts. Jacobsen is married to Grammy-Winner singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan and together they have a daughter.
violin
Colin Jacobsen
Violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen is “one of the most interesting figures on the classical music scene” (Washington Post). Since the early 2000’s, Jacobsen has forged an intriguing path in the cultural landscape of our time, collaborating with an astonishingly wide range of artists across diverse traditions and disciplines while constantly looking for news to connect with audiences. For his work as a founding member of two game-changing, audience-expanding ensembles – the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and orchestra The Knights – Jacobsen was selected from among the nation’s top visual, performing, media, and literary artists to receive a prestigious and substantial United States Artists Fellowship. He is also active as an Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning soloist and has toured with Silkroad since its founding by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 at Tanglewood. Starting in the 2022/23 season, Jacobsen assumes the position of Artistic Director of Santa Fe Pro Musica, an organization with which he has had a fruitful long term association as a guest soloist and leader.
Hailed as “one of the wonders of contemporary music” (Los Angeles Times), the string quartet Brooklyn Rider finds equal inspiration in musical languages ranging from late Beethoven to Persian classical music to American roots music to the endlessly varied voices of living composers. Together its members have presented a wealth of world premieres and toured extensively across North America, Asia and Europe, in venues ranging from clubs and rock festivals to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. The group’s artistic partnerships span the musical spectrum from Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov to John Zorn, and from Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter to banjo legend Béla Fleck, Mexican jazz singer Magos Herrera and Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. Brooklyn Rider’s recordings Passport, Dominant Curve and Seven Steps all made NPR’s best-of-the-year lists; the group’s Silent City, its collaboration with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor, was named one of Rhapsody’s Best World Music Albums of the Decade; and with Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass, the four musicians proved themselves “stunning interpreters” (Time Out Chicago) of the composer’s music Recent releases include the Grammy®-nominated Healing Modes, an ode to the healing power of music, centered around 5 new commissions alongside Beethoven’s epic Opus 132 string quartet. Described by The New Yorker as a project which “…could not possibly be more relevant or necessary than it is currently,” the composers include Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts, Caroline Shaw, and Du Yun.
It was to foster the intimacy and camaraderie of chamber music on the orchestral stage that Jacobsen and his brother, conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen, founded The Knights. As the New Yorker reports, “few ensembles are as adept at mixing old music with new as the dynamic young Brooklyn orchestra.” The “consistently inventive, infectiously engaged indie ensemble” (New York Times) has appeared at New York venues ranging from Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the 92nd Street Y to Central Park, site-specific pieces in NY’s subway system, storied concert halls worldwide including the Dresden Musikfestspiele, Cologne Philharmonie, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Berlin’s Konzerthaus, the Elbphilharmonie and Vienna’s Musikverein. The orchestra has an extensive discography including two Grammy®-nominated collaborations with frequent collaborator Gil Shaham; the world premiere recording of Osvaldo Golijov’s cello concerto Azul with cellist Yo-Yo Ma; an all-Beethoven album with Jacobsen as soloist with German cellist Jan Vogler and Finnish pianist Antti Siirala in the Triple Concerto; and the recently released Kreutzer Project, in which Jacobsen contributes an original piece Kreutzings as well as a new arrangement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for violin and orchestra. The group’s origins are explored in We Are The Knights, a documentary film produced by Thirteen/WNET and hosted by Paula Zahn. In recent years, The Knights have collaborated with a host of path-breaking artists, including South African visual artist and director William Kentridge in his acclaimed Head and the Load, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, actress Kathleen Chalfant and visual artist Brice Marden in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; and stage director Alison Moritz alongside choreographer John Heginbotham in a fully-staged version of Candide, created for the centenary celebrations of Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood.
As a violin soloist, Jacobsen was “born to the instrument and its sweet, lyrical possibilities” (New York Times). He has been featured with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Santa Fe Pro Musica, Albany Symphony, Austin Symphony, the Orlando Philharmonic, The Knights, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and has premiered concertos by Kevin Beavers and Lisa Bielawa. Recent highlights include a performance of Brahms’ Double Concerto with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and The Knights with his brother Eric as conductor for the opening of the 2022 Caramoor Music Festival. Jacobsen also performed his Kreutzer Concerto with The Knights on tour this summer at the Ravinia Festival, Clark Art Institute, and at Baltimore’s Candlelight Concert Series. In the midst of the global pandemic, he embarked on an ongoing recording and video project with choreographer John Heginbotham of Paganini’s 24 Caprices that saw its first release on WNET’s All Arts channel in August of 2022. He has been a soloist in China with composer Tan Dun performing his Water Passion and recorded Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale with Roger Waters (formerly of Pink Floyd) as narrator.
A graduate of the Juilliard School and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, Jacobsen’s principal teachers have included Doris Rothenberg, Louise Behrend, Robert Mann and Vera Beths.
Colin Jacobsen plays on a violin made for him in 2024 by the French luthier Patrick Robin.
The Creators
Maurice Ravel
Fast Facts:
- Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist, and conductor born in 1875 in Basque Country of Southern France. His father was Franco-Swiss while his mother was Basque, introducing Spanish folk songs into Ravel’s life from a young age that later influenced many of his works.
- Despite being an exacting and talented composer, Ravel struggled while attending the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. He applied for the Grand Prix de Rome 5 times, only to win second prize once. Ravel failed to adhere to many of the composition rules outlined by the composition as he developed his own understanding and style of harmony that included many ‘rule-breaking’ harmonies and progressions.
- Ravel was a painstakingly slow worker, composing his works twice: once for piano, and once for full instrumentation. However, this method reveals another one of the composer’s talents: orchestration.
- Ravel loved to include a wide variety of styles of music within his work. He incorporated elements of modernism, neoclassicism, jazz, and folk music in his music.
- He is often regarded as an “impressionist” along the likes of Debussy and Monet. Though he despised the term, Ravel’s music echoes the tenets of this artistic movement with a focus of ambiguous harmonies to give the sensation or impression of a certain feeling or image.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Fast Facts:
- Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer born in 1872. His works fostered a uniquely English sound to create a decisive break away from the dominant German-style of music of the 19th century.
- Dissatisfied with the English music scene, Vaughan Williams sought to reinvigorate the English sound through studies of English folksongs and styles. Within his own compositions, Vaughan Williams adapted the modal forms and styles of these tunes rather than direct quotations.
- During World War I, Vaughan Williams volunteered for the army and served as the director of music for the First Army of the British Expeditionary Force.
- Vaughan Williams composed in almost every genre of instrumental music. He composed symphonies, operas, ballet, choral works, and film scores.
Antonio Vivaldi
Fast Facts:
- Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian composer and virtuoso violinist born in 1678. He is now regarded as one of the great Baroque composers.
- Vivaldi composed in a variety of genres including instrumental concertos, sacred choral works, and operas. Yet, he is most known for his output of violin concertos, writing over 200 of them in his lifetime.
- He was ordained as a priest in 1703 at age 25, starting his theological studies at 15. His status as a priest and his fiery red hair earned the composer the nickname “The Red Priest.”
- Vivaldi spent a large portion of his life as a teacher and conductor at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls. Here, he composed, taught, and conducted the girls in musical ensembles. It was for these students that Vivaldi wrote all his violin concertos.
- Vivaldi was known for his flamboyant vanity. He boasted that he could compose a concerto faster than it could be copied.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pronounced PYO-tur ihl-YIHCH chai-KOFF-skee
Fast Facts:
- Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 in Russia, where he was the second eldest of his parents’ six surviving offspring.
- Tchaikovsky displayed astute musical abilities from a young age as he improvised on piano and composed at age 4.
- It wasn’t until Tchaikovsky premiered his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor that he received acclaim for his compositions. Prior to this concerto, he released two symphonies and multiple operas, which did not receive the same fanfare as this Piano Concerto.
- Tchaikovsky is most known for his ballets including, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker.
- Tchaikovsky got married in 1877 to Antonina Miliukova. However, soon after the wedding he realized he could not handle being married and abandoned his wife weeks after the wedding, fleeing to Switzerland and Italy. Luckily, this escape allowed him to write some of his most famous works such as Suite Italienne and his Violin Concerto.
- In 1878, Tchaikovsky resigned from faculty at the Moscow Conservatory. The only way he could afford this was because of the patronage of a wealthy widow named Nadezhda von Meck. The only catch with their arrangement was that they could never meet.
The Pieces
Ravel
Tzigane
Listen to Ravel’s Tzigane by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra:
- Ravel’s Tzigane, Rapsodie de Concert is a virtuosic work for solo violin and orchestra, written in 1924 for Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi. The composer describes the work as “a virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian Rhapsody.”
- Ravel first got the idea for the piece during a visit to London where he heard d’Aranyi performing his Sonata for Violin and Cello. Afterwards he asked her to perform some Gypsy melodies, which went until five in the morning. These melodies and improvisations would later inform the style and name of the work as Tzigane means “Gypsy.”
- The original version of the work was not written for violin and orchestra but rather the recently devised piano-luthéal. This instrument was a modified grand piano that allowed the player to alter the sound of the instrument by employing harmonium-like stops above the keyboard to produce sounds ranging from lute, harpsichord, and normal piano. Ravel chose this accompanimental instrument as one of the stops sounds similar to the Hungarian cimbalom (a hammered dulcimer), fitting the style of the piece as a whole.
- The work opens with an extended cadenza for solo violin, which through a whirl of runs, staccato notes, and trills whisks the audience into this otherworldly “exotic” atmosphere. From here is a succession of “gypsy improvisations,” taking a Hungarian folk-like theme and producing variations with every possible trick on the violin. The music then becomes impatient and feverishly runs to a virtuosic end.
Williams
Lark Ascending
Listen to Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending by the Philharmonic Orchestra:
- Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending is a pastoral rhapsody for solo violin and orchestra, written in 1914 and revised in 1920. It is dedicated to English violinist Marie Hall.
- The piece’s title comes from a poem by George Meredith, in which Vaughan Williams prefaced the score with lines from the poem. The composer’s wife once described this work as Vaughan Williams taking “a literary idea on which to build his musical thought… and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight…”
- The piece opens with the solo violin emulating the bird’s ascent with three fluttering gestures. From here, the orchestra joins as the bird lifts into flight, leading into three violin cadenzas throughout. Yet, the soloist always integrated within the orchestra despite being a soloist, reflecting the unity between the bird, the wind, and the sky. The entire rhapsody encapsulates a soaring and majestic flight above the placid countryside of Cotswold that inspired Vaughan Williams in the first place.
Vivaldi
“Winter” from The Four Seasons
Listen to Vivaldi’s “Winter” by the Netherland Bach Society:
- Vivaldi wrote this group of four violin concerti between 1718-1723 while the composer was the court chapel master in Mantua.
- Each of the concerti musically realize each season of the year. With each concerto, there is a related sonnet written by the composer himself to illustrate the intended spirit of each season. In addition to this, Vivaldi added musical elements to echo the sonnets with barking dog sounds, chirping birds, or bubbling brooks.
- During the Baroque period, many pieces left space for performers to add their own personal flair through ornamentation or small improvisatory Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is no exception as many performers will add their own flourish to each movement.
Tchaikovsky’s
Excerpts from The Nutcracker
Listen to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra:
- Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker is a ballet written in 1892, the final ballet the composer wrote.
- The ballet is based on E.T.A Hoffmann’s 1816 fairytale, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King). The story follows Clara’s adventure on Christmas Eve when her newly gifted Nutcracker comes to life. The two go on an adventure, battling the Mouse King, dancing among the snowflakes, traveling the world, and end with a visit to the Sugar Plum Fairy before Clara wakes up from her dream.
- During the time of the ballet’s publication, the work was only somewhat successful, having only a few performances outside of Russia. Now, The Nutcracker is a Christmas classic, heralding productions of all sizes and styles, choreographed or not.
- Throughout Clara and the Nutcracker’s travel across the world, Tchaikovsky imitates various “exotic” cultures with musical elements to transport the listeners. From castanets and rhythmic snaps to emulate Spanish dance, to persistent drones and modal harmonies for the Arabian dance, to pentatonic flute melodies for the Chinese dance, Tchaikovsky is able to bring the world to Clara through music. However, it is important to note that Tchaikovsky’s music for these counties is heavily generalized and exoticized as there are no clear authentic musical sources for these musical themes.
Glossary
Ballet
An orchestral composition meant to accompany a choreographed dance production. The story is told completely through sound and movement.
Baroque
The style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from the early 1600s until the 1750s. Bach, Handel and Vivaldi are from this period.
Concerto
A work for a solo instrument accompanied by orchestra, usually in three movements. Concerti is the plural of concerto.
Genre
A music genre is a category that classifies specific pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions
Impressionism
Artistic and musical movement that focused on capturing the experience rather than the object or image. For musicians, this meant trying to create new sound experiences that focus on exploring various sensations and facets of an image without directly sonically creating it.
Improvision
The act of creating, performing, or doing something spontaneously without prior planning, preparation, or a script. Musicians spontaneously compose melodies, solos, or rhythms on the spot while maintaining the underlying structure.
Neo-classicism
Musical movement in the 20th century that revived earlier period styles from the Baroque and Classical era but reworked them through modern harmony and rhythm.
Orchestration
The process in which a composer assigns musical elements to specific instruments or voices.
Rhapsody
A single-movement work that is free-flowing in structure, going through various musical ideas.