What about the music?
An inside look with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Symphonie Fantastique
Friday, April 11, 2025 | 7:30PM | Ferguson Center
Saturday, April 12, 2025 | 7:30PM | Sandler Center
Anna Clyne: This Moment
John Adams: Harmonium
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
By Stella Feliberti
The Performers
Conductor
Eric Jacobsen
Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming. He is the newly-named Music Director of the Virginia Symphony, becoming the 12th music director in the orchestra’s 100-year history.
Jacobsen is Artistic Director and conductor of The Knights, and serves as the Music Director for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. Jacobsen founded the adventurous orchestra The Knights with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, to foster the intimacy and camaraderie of chamber music on the orchestral stage. Eric splits his time between New York and Orlando with his wife, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, and their daughter.
The Creators
Anne Clyne
Fast Facts:
- Anna Clyne is an English composer who was born in 1980 in London. She began composing at age 7. Her first composition was premiered when she was 11.
- From 2008 to 2010, Clyne was director of New York Youth Symphony’s “Making Score” program for young composers.
- Clyne enjoys doing several cross-genre collaborations. She often uses visual arts in her projects. Her work Abstractions (2016) was inspired by five contemporary artworks, Color Field (2020) is inspired by Rothko paintings, and she even collaborated on a film with Jyll Bradley entitled Woman Holding a Balance (2021).
- Her compositions often also include electronics including tapes, live processing, or pre-recorded tracks. She works in both acoustic and electroacoustic music.
John Adams
Fast Facts:
- John Adams was born in 1947 in Massachusetts. He grew up in a musical family, which exposed him to variety of musical genres including classical, jazz, musical theatre, and rock music. He started to compose at age 10.
- Adams is known for modernist and minimalist compositions; He believes that music had to continue progressing by pushing the boundaries of music with this new style of music.
- Adams was the first Harvard student to write a musical composition for his senior thesis. The piece was called The Electric Wake, which used amplified soprano accompanied by an ensemble of electric strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion.
- In addition to being a composer, Adams also is an internationally known conductor. He has worked with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
- His piece On the Transmigration of Souls won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music and the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition. This piece was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a memorial piece for the victims. It features taped readings of the names of the victims blended with sounds of the city.
Hector Berlioz
Pronounced EHK-tor BEHR-lee-ohz
Fast Facts:
- Hector Berlioz was born in 1860 in France. His father was a well-respected doctor, and his mother was strict Roman Catholic, leading to Berlioz growing up in a restrictive household and little opportunity to express him musical interests.
- In 1821, Berlioz moved to Paris to study medicine. However, he used his time in Paris to dive into the musical scene, discovering his true passion for music. He then defied his parents’ expectations of him and decided to pursue composing full time after graduating from medical school.
- Berlioz was a book worm. He grew up reading classics by Virgil and Shakespeare, which later inspired some of his compositions including his symphony Roméo et Juliette.
- He was also a music journalist throughout his composing career. His most famous writing is his Treatise on Instrumentation, which influenced many compositional styles of the 19th and 20th century.
Clyne
This Moment
Listen to an excerpt of Clyne’s This Moment:
- This piece was written in 2023 and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival.
- This Moment is inspired by the calligraphy of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. It is a mediation on his saying of “this moment is full of wonder.” Clyne also pulls inspiration form Hanh’s words of “when you mediate on death, you love life more, you cherish life more.”
- The piece is additionally a response to the societal grief and loss over the last year. To highlight this, Clyne borrows two sections from Mozart’s Requiem. The first is from the Kyrie movement and the second from the instrumental Lacrimosa from the Sequentia
Discussion Questions
- What is the impact of Clyne’s quotations of Mozart’s Requiem?
- How successful do you think Clyne is in achieving his reflection of Hahn’s quotes?
- How does this piece evoke a sense of mediation of the world’s suffering and grief?
Adams
Harmonium
Listen to Adams’s Harmonium by the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus:
- Harmonium was written in 1980-1981 for the first season of Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. It is considered one of the key compositions of Adams’ minimalist period.
- This piece is in three movements, each with a different poem set to the music. The first movement is set to John Donne’s “Negative Love,” the second to “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson, and the third to “Wild Nights” by Emily Dickinson.
- Adams aimed to have this piece focus around death and transfiguration, which are key things in each poem he chose to set each movement to. He pairs the words of these poems with various compositional techniques to illustrate this complex ascent from life to death and beyond.
- This piece is based in small motivic materials that are used as continually repeating cells to create larger shapes, which develops a web of activity that encompasses both lightness and darkness, and serenity and turbulence.
Discussion Questions
- Even with minimalist techniques, how is Adams able to create so much emotional variety throughout the piece?
- In what ways does Adams’ composition reflect the words of the poems he chose?
- What is the impact of Adams’ use of repetitive cells instead of larger melodic materials? Does this technique help or hinder his goal to illustrate these poems?
Berlioz
Symphonie Fantastique
Listen to Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France:
- Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique was written in 1830. He was inspired to write it after he fell in love with Harriet Smithson years before the premiere. During a concert of the piece, Smithson finally met Berlioz and the two married the following year.
- Berlioz wrote his own detailed account of the symphony’s vivid storyline: “A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.”
- Throughout the entire symphony, Berlioz includes a singular melody that represents this idée fixe (psychological fixation). It is first introduced in the first movement but woven into all the textures of the other movements following. At one point, Berlioz blends the idée fixe with the Dies Irae from the Mass of the Dead.
- Each movement depicts a specific scene, notated in the score. The first movement is labeled Daydreams, passions. The second, a ball; the third, scene in the countryside; the fourth, march to the scaffold; and the final movement, dream of a witches’ sabbath.
Discussion Questions
- In what ways does Berlioz make this symphony seems like a dream sequence?
- This piece was written around the same time as the later Beethoven symphonies; how is this piece similar or different from the style of these pieces?
- What is the effect of Berlioz’ use of the same “idée fixe” throughout the full work?
- This piece is called the “Fantastical Symphony;” why do you think Berlioz called it this?
