What about the music?
An inside look with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Ravel, Janáček, and the Art of Alex Sopp: Illustrating Sound
April 16, 2027 | 7:30PM | Sandler Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia Beach – Get Tickets
April 17, 2027 | 7:30PM |CNU’s Ferguson Center for the Arts, Diamonstein Concert Hall, Newport News – Get Tickets
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Alex Sopp, visual artist
Virginia Symphony Orchestra Chorus
Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2
Caroline Shaw: The Mountain that Loved a Bird
Leoš Janáček: Sinfonietta
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.
Visual Artist
Alex Sopp
Alex Sopp creates flowering gardens of song and clouds of harmonious flute sound, rendering dreams and reimagining portraits, channeling a state of wonder and enchantment. As a flutist, she is renowned for her “exquisite” and “beautifully nuanced” playing (NY Times). She is a founding member of yMusic, The Knights, NOW Ensemble, and the Berlin-based Between Worlds Ensemble. Her debut album of “fresh and singular…utterly seductive” (The Wire) original songs, “The Hem & The Haw” was released to much critical acclaim on New Amsterdam Records in Spring of 2024
From her home in Brooklyn, she has traveled the world making music. As an orchestral musician she has played principal flute in the New York Philharmonic (also as soloist) and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on tour, as a guest with the Mariiinsky Theatre and Bremen Camerata, and with her legendary chamber orchestra The Knights at venues such as the Ojai Festival, Suntory Hall, and the Lucerne Festival.
As a songwriter, flutist and singer, she has performed with yMusic at arenas and concert venues around the world and on Saturday Night Live in support of their album with Paul Simon, performing iconic harmonic vocal lines and whistle solos, as well as playing flute in original arrangements from Simon’s storied catalog developed in rehearsal. yMusic redefines the mixed chamber ensemble on the classical concert stage as a creative, compositional voice in its own right, having premiered new work by the ensemble itself and a major commission from Andrew Norman in one concert at Carnegie Hall, while creating an outpouring of collaboratively created arrangements with major artists such as John Legend, Ben Folds, and Anohni.
Alex’s work takes her across many borders musically, performing in the South African artist William Kentridge’s “The Head and the Load”, working with flamenco musicians and the Georgian male chorus, The Rustavi Ensemble, with the Between Worlds Ensemble at the Pierre Boulez Saal and Elbphilharmonie, and recording flutes in the studio and at home for a huge range of popular styles including Taylor Swift, Sufjan Stevens, The Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent, and The National, as well as many film scores for Philip Glass.
As flute soloist, she has premiered works by Nico Muhly, performed the world premiere of Judd Greenstein’s flute concerto at the Montreal Bach Festival, and will premiere a new Rhapsody for flute and orchestra by Allison Loggins-Hull commissioned for her and The Knights at Carnegie Hall in 2024. Equally in demand for her singing, she has recently given concerto performances playing flute and singing in music by Gabriel Kahane with the Oregon and Cincinnati Symphonies (alongside her longtime friend and Juilliard classmate Nathalie Joachim) as well as a featured singing role in Chris Thile’s recent song cycle premiered by The Knights at the Tanglewood Festival.
She is an advocate for creative risk-taking and multi-disciplinary freedom for artists. This led her to be the first ever recipient of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary residency as Artist in Residence at Duke University. Her unique artwork, ranging from meticulously detailed pen drawings to evocative paintings has been used by a wide array of artists and brands to bring their projects to visual life: from musicians such Joshua Bell to companies like Primis Imports and cutting edge organizations like Castle of Our Skins.
Virginia Symphony Orchestra Chorus
The 2025-2026 season marks the 36th anniversary of the Virginia Symphony Chorus, and its twenty-ninth under the direction of Chorusmaster Robert Shoup. In addition to regular appearances with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, the chorus has performed outside Hampton Roads to remarkable acclaim. Under the baton of Mr. Shoup, the Chorus has traveled to sold-out houses as far afield as Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Salzburg and closer to home at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The Chorus has appeared twice at the Breckenridge Music Festival in Colorado, was an integral part of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown Celebration, and in 2010 was the featured chorus of the critically-acclaimed Virginia Arts Festival performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In 2012, the Chorus was a key participant with the Virginia Arts Festival presentation of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. In May of 2013, a commendable performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces was presented and recorded in Norfolk. More recent performances include Attention!, a delightful retrospective with mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile and presentations of John Adams’ Harmonium and Gabriel Kahane’s La Croix.
The Creators
Allison Loggins-Hull
Fast Facts:
- Allison Loggins-Hull is an American composer, flutist, and producer. She produces works that range from symphonic music, film scores, chamber music, to electronic music.
- Her composition style borrows from contemporary music production techniques to create new and unique sonic effects in her classical works. This is often paired with Black American music influences to create what she calls “a vibrant and kaleidoscopic sonic palette.” Her works include reflections on Black stories, music, and experience that align with Afrofuturism, a movement that imagines alternative realities and liberation through a Black cultural lens.
- In addition to composing, Loggins-Hull is part of a flute duo named Flutronix. The pair was invited to the flute vault of the Library of Congress to play on their collection of flutes. She later received a commission from the Library of Congress for singing flutist for Flutronix.
- Loggins-Hull has also collaborated with a variety of pop artists including Lizzo and Frank Ocean. She additionally performed on multiple film scores and composed the score for Bring Them Back.
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 the 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.
Leoš Janàček
Fast Facts:
- Leoš Janàček is a Czech composer and music theorist born in 1854 in Moravia. He showed early music talent in choral singing. His father originally wanted him to become a teacher but changed his mind once Janàček’s musical talents were obvious.
- While at school, Janàček originally intended to study piano and organ but switched to composition full time. However, as a student he was heavily impoverished and had to compose using a drawn keyboard on his tabletop rather than a proper piano
- Janàček’s music is highly recognizable and unique because of his close study of speech rhythms and inflections. He often translates these into melodic contours in both his instrumental and vocal works. As a result, his music encaptured a Realist aesthetic where emotional truth is evoked by his “speech melodies.”
- Like his Czech predecessor Dvořák, Janàček was also highly interested in using folk music in his works, especially from Moravia. His study of these folk idioms informed his use of modal harmonies.
The Pieces
Loggins-Hull
Can You See?
Listen to Loggins-Hull’s Can You See? By the Cleveland Orchestra:
- Can You See? originally is a small chamber ensemble piece, reorchestrated for full orchestra in 2023 for The Cleveland Orchestra. The original commission was to create an arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner with a mournful approach to honor lives lost and highlight the role of the living after loss.
- The reorchestration for full orchestra expands these themes to provide a more curious and hopeful atmosphere through sonic effects to create delays. As a result, this version provides a dreamy soundscape in addition to posing questions to the meaning of The Star Spangled Banner.
- Various sonic effects are used to recontextualize The Star Spangled Banner. Loggins-Hull employs techniques such as delay effects, stretching out melodies, and blurring timbres to illustrate uncertainty, question, and tension to change the perception of the quoted materials.
Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé Suite No.2
Listen to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe by the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela:
- Daphnies et Chloé is a ballet and orchestral suite written by Ravel in 1912. It musically realizes the Greek romance of two pastoral lovers, Daphnis and Chloé written by Longus.
- In the ballet, Chloé, the shepherdess, is abducted by pirates while Daphnis, though distraught, falls into sleep during which he dreams that the god Pan will help him rescue Chloé. When he awakens, he finds that his dream was real and Chloé has been returned to him.
- The suite was commissioned by impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes whose chief choreographer wanted to do a Greek ballet. Unlike typical ballets that were made up of isolated musical numbers with controlled tempi, meters, and length this work is, according to Ravel, “constructed symphonically on a very strict tonal plan, with a number of themes whose developments assure the homogeneity of the work.”
- This suite opens with Daybreak, a display of warmth and light as nature begins to awaken in all its marvelous beauty with bubbling brooks and birds chipping as Daphnis and Chloé embrace. Next is Pantomime that opens with a languorous flute solo that mimics Pan’s pleas to a reluctant Syrinx, the story in which Daphnis and Chloé mime. Last is The General Dance, an exciting celebration of the reunification of Daphnis Chloé at last.
Janàček
Sinfonietta
Listen to Janàček’s Sinfonietta by the WDR Symphony Orchestra:
- Janàček wrote his Sinfonietta in 1926, dedicated to the Czechoslovak Army. It is often subtitled as “Military Sinfonietta” or “Sokol Festival.”
- The piece was intended to illustrate a “contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory.” He was inspired by brass bands and began to write his own fanfares that permeate much of the work.
- Janàček wrote this piece as a commission for the Eighth National Sokol Rally. Sokol was a Czech gymnastics association that promoted physical fitness and Czech nationalism when the Czech nation struggled with its own cultural and political identity within the Austrian Hapsburg empire. Thus from the start, Janàček saw this work as a qusi-military composition.
- In addition to militaristic fanfares, Janàček also includes many tributes to his home in Moravia. Many of the movements within the piece have titles connected to places in Brno such as “The Castle,” “The Queen’s Monastery,” “The Street,” and “the Town Hall.”
- The Sinfonietta opens with austere and commanding brass fanfares, setting the tone for militarism and nationalism. Following these brass calls, is “The Castle” that features scurrying themes in the woodwinds and soaring themes in the cellos, adding a new layer of mysticism and curiosity. The third movement expands the lyricism first found in “the Castle” with passionate yearning phrases in the strings to illustrate “The Queen’s Monastery, Brno.” Next is a bustling scherzo that builds in musical textures to underscore the vivacity of “The Street Leading to the Castle.” Though the last movement starts with a calm, mystical theme, this quickly shifts into a triumphant fanfare, returning to the glory of the first movement with added decoration in the strings and the winds.
Glossary
Orchestral Suite
An ordered set of movements for orchestra. Sometimes includes an arrangement of a different genre for orchestra.
Sinfonietta
A smaller scale multimovement work for orchestra either for smaller orchestra or shorter movements.