What about the music?
An inside look with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto & Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony
Friday, February 20, 2026 | 7:30PM | Diamonstein Concert Hall – Ferguson Center – Get Tickets
Sunday, February 22, 2026 | 2:30PM | Sandler Center – Get Tickets
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Clayton Stephenson, piano
Nathalie Joachim: Cocoon
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5
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’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.
Piano
Clayton Stephenson
American pianist Clayton Stephenson’s love for music is immediately apparent in his joyous charisma onstage, expressive power, and natural ease at the instrument. Hailed for “extraordinary narrative and poetic gifts” and interpretations that are “fresh, incisive and characterfully alive” (Gramophone), he is committed to making an impact on the world through his music-making.
Growing up in New York City, Clayton started piano lessons at age 7 and was accepted into the Juilliard Outreach Music Advancement Program for underprivileged children the next year, where he attended numerous student recitals and fell in love with music. At the age of 10 he advanced to Juilliard’s elite Pre-College program with the help of his teacher, Beth Nam. At Juilliard he studied with Matti Raekallio, Hung-Kuang Chen and Ernest Barretta. Clayton practiced on a synthesizer at home until he found an old upright piano on the street that an elementary school had thrown away; that would become his practice piano for the next six years, until the Lang Lang Foundation donated a new piano to him when he was 17.
He credits the generous support of community programs with providing him musical inspiration and resources along the way. As he describes it, the “3rd Street Music School jump-started my music education; the Young People’s Choir taught me phrasing and voicing; the Juilliard Outreach Music Advancement Program introduced me to formal and rigorous piano training, which enabled me to get into Juilliard Pre-College; the Morningside Music Bridge validated my talent and elevated my self-confidence; the Boy’s Club of New York exposed me to jazz; and the Lang Lang Foundation brought me to stages worldwide and transformed me from a piano student to a young artist.”
Recent and upcoming highlights of Clayton’s burgeoning career include appearances with the Calgary Philharmonic, Chicago Sinfonietta, and the Fort Worth, Louisville, Lansing and North Carolina Symphony Orchestras; as well as recitals at the Phillips Collection Concert Series in Washington, DC, Foundation Louis Vuitton Auditorium in Paris, Bad Kissinger Sommer Festival and BeethovenFest in Germany, Colour of Music Festival, Ravinia Festival and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. He has been featured on NPR, WUOL, and WQXR, and appeared in the “GRAMMY® Salute to Classical Music” Concert at Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium.
He now studies in the Harvard-NEC Dual Degree Program, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in economics at Harvard and a master’s degree in piano performance at the New England Conservatory under Wha Kyung Byun. And his accolades along the way have been numerous – in addition to being the first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022, he was named a 2022 Gilmore Young Artist, as well as a 2017 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Young Scholar of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation. He also received a jury discretionary award at the 2015 Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition and Festival.
The Creators
Nathalie Jaochim
Fast Facts:
- Nathalie Joachim is a Haitian-American vocalist, flautist, and composer born in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up playing piano at 4 years old, eventually picking up flute at age 9. At age 10, she participated in the Juilliard School’s music advancement program and later attended its pre-college division.
- Joachim attended both the Juilliard School and The New School, the latter of which she studied audio production and sound design. Many of her works include a blend of genres including indie-rock, pop, jazz, hip-hop, electronic music and classical.
- Joachim, though raised in New York, has strong ties with the Haitian community as her family is from the rural village of Dantan in Haiti. Her project Fanm d’Ayiti explores her Haitian roots. She describes the impact of this project’s research process as “in some way each woman opened the door for the next and opened a door for me. I found this synergy between my story as an American-born woman feel deeply connected to this heritage and their voices.” It was for this work that she received a GRAMMY nomination for Best World Music Album.
- Joachim is also a music educator. She currently teaches at Princeton University where she teaches music theory, composition, and contemporary music.
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.
Sergei Prokofiev
Pronounced sehr-gey pro-kof-ee-ef
Fast Facts:
- Sergei Prokofiev was born in 1891. His mother fueled his musical desires as she would play Chopin and Beethoven on the piano at night. Thus, Prokofiev began composing young with his first piano piece finished at five and first opera at nine.
- In addition to being fond of music at a young age, Prokofiev also had a passion for chess. He learned to play at age seven, and remained fond of the game his entire life. He even became acquainted with world class chess players such Jose Raul Capablanca and Mikhail Botvinnik.
- Prokofiev first gained acclaim as a composer-pianist, composing a series of difficult works for the piano. His second piano concerto caused scandal at its premiere due to its modernist (music that diverges from traditional tonal harmony and structure) approach. One audience member claimed that “the cats on the roof make better music!” but many other modernist composers were highly impressed.
- Though he composed in a wide variety of genres, Prokofiev’s favorite genre was opera. His most famous work is The Love for Three Oranges, which is a satirical opera about a sad prince who must find three oranges, each containing a princess.
- Prokofiev is now known as a figure of contemporary music as not only wrote original diatonic melodies but also was unafraid of music experimentation. According to fellow Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, he was the greatest Russian composer of his day, after Stravinsky himself.
The Piece
Joachim
Cocoon
- Scored for: three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
- Performance time: 5 minutes
- World premiere performance: Summer 2024 at Grant Park with Eric Jacobsen conducting
- A note by the composer, Natalie Joachim:
“A cocoon by definition is something that envelops or surrounds an object in a protective or comforting way. It can also be the act of retreating from the stressful conditions of public life into a cozy private world. A way of quietly disappearing with hopes of returning renewed. This work is a sonic invitation into these dualities – the quiet power found by secluding oneself with restorative intentions and the violent energetic shifts that accompany necessary growth. The short work is an expression of expansion, beginning in a delicate space held together by extremes – a contemplative song in the low strings and clarinets that calls forth a sparkling melody in the piccolo and celesta. It feels utterly lonely and warm all at once. Then the violins begin to unfurl a broadening that continues to shimmer as it glides forward towards a newly found heartbeat in the percussion section and building chorales and rally cries in the brass and woodwinds. A sudden interjection of a tutti section showcasing high pitched kinetic energy with rhythmic mayhem in the drums leads to the works’ smoothly cinematic and triumphant peak. This comforting arrival ultimately gives way to one final moment of uncomfortable chaos before settling into reassured reflection. Cocoon in many ways is about process, in life and in music. It’s about embracing ease and disorder all at once, and trusting that what awaits on the other side is usually well worth it.”
Discussion Question
Describe what a cocoon means to you and what sounds you would either block out or welcome to recharge/renew.
Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto No.1
Listen to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 from Martha Argerich and the Verbier Festival Orchestra:
- Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto was composed between 1874 and 1875, in hopes that pianist Nikolai Rubenstein would help establish it as part of the repertoire. However, after playing the first movement, Rubenstein heavily criticized the work, calling it unplayable. And yet, Tchaikovsky refused to change any of the notes. It was only until 1879 and in 1888 that the composer provided revisions.
- After the disagreement with Rubenstein on the quality of the work, Tchaikovsky dedicated the work to German pianist Hans von Bülow. Bülow premiered the work in Boston, which was a triumphant success and marked the beginning of Tchaikovsky’s increased popularity in the US.
- The concerto includes many themes to evoke Russian nationalism. In all the movements there are melodies based on Ukrainian folk tunes. This air of Russian nationalism later inspired the Russian Olympic Committee to use an excerpt of the concerto as the Anthem of the Russian Olympic Committee after Russia was banned from all major sporting competitions.
Discussion Question
Many composers use folk music as inspiration in their works. How do you think hearing folk music in an orchestral piece might evoke nationalistic feelings?
Prokofiev
Symphony No. 5
Listen to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony for the Orchestre de Paris:
- Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was written in 1944, finishing the work in one month at the resort of Ivanovo — a place where the Soviet Composers’ Union made it possible for Soviet composers to continue their work away from their war-ravaged cities.
- Prior to writing this symphony, Prokofiev had spent 15 years abroad where he took a break from writing symphonic forms for 16 years. Thus, he said, “the Fifth Symphony is the culmination of an entire period in my work. I conceived of it as a symphony on the greatness of the human soul.”
- At the premiere of the work in 1945, the composer said that he intended the work to be “a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit.”
- The symphony starts with a long and slow introduction, similar to the style of Shostakovich. However, this introduction is different from Shostakovich’s as there is more variety in mood, blending this solemn introduction with an exciting finale that elicited a spontaneous burst of applause at its premiere. The second movement is brilliant and animated with staccato strings and syncopated winds, eventually joined by piano and percussion. The next movement is hauntingly beautiful with its lyrical and tuneful clarinet theme, followed by a darker development that allows for a thrilling climax and gentle ending. Finally, the symphony closes with deceptive simplicity, eventually divulging into wild dancing that ends with an exciting coda.