Symphonie Fantastique

The Berlioz classic and one of Mobile’s all-time favorite pianists – Charlie Albright – 
returns to perform Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2.

Scott Speck, conductor
Charlie Albright, piano

Saenger Theatre

Saturday, May 17, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 2:30 pm

PROGRAM

Maurice Ravel La Valse

Camille Saint-SaënsPiano Concerto No.2 g minor, Op. 22

Charlie Albright

Hector Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14

This performance, including intermission, runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes.

TakeNote! Learn More, Enjoy More

Enhance your concert experience with Take-Note! Join music experts and explore the world of classical music from an in-depth perspective. This informative pre-concert talk begins at 6:30 p.m. before Saturday classical performances and 1:30 p.m. before Sunday classical performances in Room 1927 adjacent to the Saenger entrance on Joachim Street.

Brings the kids for FREE on Sundays!

Bring the kids for FREE on Sunday!

Through MSO’s Big Red Ticket program, sponsored by Alabama Power Foundation and the Figures Foundation, students in grades K-12 can attend any classical Sunday matinee FREE when accompanied by a paying adult. It’s a great cultural opportunity and an amazing concert experience! Seats are limited, so please purchase tickets by phone at 251-432-2010. Please no children under 5 and no babies in arms. Want to bring a student on a Saturday? Student tickets are just $10.

From our Music Director

The Mobile Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-2025 season ends in a blaze of glory, highlighting three masterful French composers. Maurice Ravel’s La Valse opens the concert with its intoxicating whirl of waltzes, shimmering with kaleidoscopic colors. The music first draws us into a world of swirling dance and poignant nostalgia – and then devolves into a stunning depiction of the devastation of the early 20th century.

The ebullient pianist Charlie Albright returns for Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2, showcasing his virtuosic pyrotechnics and lyrical sensitivity in this Romantic masterpiece.

The concert culminates with Hector Berlioz’s visionary Symphonie Fantastique, a symphonic odyssey that delves into the depths of the Romantic imagination. From the dreamlike reveries of the “Reveries – Passions” to the electrifying “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” Berlioz’s powerful and innovative symphony unfolds with theatricality and emotional intensity. A thrilling end to a thrilling season!

– Scott Speck, Music Director

Our Soloist: Charlie Albright

Hailed as “among the most gifted musicians of his generation” with a “dazzling natural keyboard affinity” who “made quite an impression” by the Washington Post, American pianist/composer/improviser Charlie Albright has been praised for his “jaw-dropping technique and virtuosity meshed with a distinctive musicality” by The New York Times, and his “extravagance that had showmanship but never felt cheap” with hisease and smoothness that refuses to airbrush the music, but animates it from within” by the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and Gilmore Young Artist Award, Albright won the Ruhr Klavier Festival Young Artist Award presented by Marc-André Hamelin (Germany) and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions.  In addition to performing, Albright is sought after as a speaker, masterclass instructor, teacher, and competition judge.  His debut commercial recording, Vivace, has sold thousands of copies worldwide and the first two parts of a 3-part Schubert Series of live, all-Schubert recordings was released in 2017 and 2020. Charlie Albright breaks the “classical” rules of music by connecting with audiences like no other. Through his music, speaking, and unique improvisations that bring music to life, he crosses all genres…and makes it fun.

Albright, who last performed with the MSO in March 2022 is a local favorite. He regularly performs in programs featuring artists from all genres, including vocalist/conductor Bobby McFerrin, violinist Joshua Bell, pianist Emanuel Ax, conductor Gum Nanse, Vocalists Harry Connick Jr., Marc Martel, and Branford Marsalis, and Broadway vocalists Mandy Gonzalez, Scarlett Strallen, and Hugh Panaro.  He has performed five times with revered cellist Yo-Yo Ma: at the honorary degree ceremony at Harvard University for Senator Ted Kennedy; at a 10th anniversary remembrance of 9/11; at the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison; at the Aspen Institute’s Citizen Artistry conference in New York; and with the Silk Road Project.

Albright appears regularly worldwide with such orchestras as the San Francisco, Seattle, Boston Pops, Philly Pops, BBC Concert Orchestra, Seongnam Philharmonic (Korea), Bergen (Norway), Victoria (Canada), and NCPA (China) Symphonies; and at venues including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Grieg Hall (Norway), and the mainstage of Carnegie Hall.

Albright’s compositions and improvisations have been likened to “the great Romantic-era composer-pianists” by Classical Source and have been praised as “thrilling” by the DC Metro Theatre Arts.  The Philadelphia Inquirer raved that he “brought the art of classical-music improvisation to a new level.”  The Boston Musical Intelligencer wrote simply that “Albright is a master of improvisation.”

A firm believer in education, Albright founded the Charlie Albright Scholarship and Charlie Albright Piano in collaboration with the Centralia College Foundation in his hometown. The Scholarship provides financial aid to music students, and money was raised to purchase and maintain a new 9-foot Steinway Piano for the college’s Corbet Hall.

Albright graduated as the first classical pianist in the Harvard/NEC Joint Program and received his Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School, having studied with Nancy Adsit, Wha-Kyung Byun, and Yoheved Kaplinsky. Albright is an official Steinway Artist.

Find out more here. (CharlieAlbright.com)

Program Notes

La Valse

Maurice Ravel
BORN March 7, 1875 | Ciboure, France
DIED December 28, 1937 | Paris, France

Around 1906, Maurice Ravel began composing a symphonic poem about the great European capital of Vienna, which he titled “Wien.” It was an homage to Johann Strauss and the Waltz: a dance form that had held the city’s imagination for an entire century. Ravel, who was a notoriously slow composer, finally got around to orchestrating the work in about 1914. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned the symphonic poem when Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. As the First World War began, Ravel felt it was not the time to laud the Austrian capital.

The war was not easy on Ravel. He stopped composing, enlisted as a lorry driver, and lost many friends (whom he honored in the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin). Coming out of the war, he suffered from insomnia and his rate of composition slowed even further. Upon receiving a commission from the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Ravel returned to his “Wien” symphonic poem, rewriting it as ballet for the post-war world.

The re-titled La Valse no longer sounds like a tribute to the charming, whirling, glittering sounds of Strauss’s Vienna. Instead, in Ravel’s post-war composition, the waltz slowly materializes out of nothingness. Fragments are heard long before any danceable themes emerge. No sooner do we begin to feel the rhythm and hear the melodies of the waltz than it is interrupted: loud percussion crashes throw it into disarray and dissonance. The piece grows to a chaotic climax before coming to a violent end with crashing unisons from the whole orchestra.

Ravel provided a rather benign description of the piece in his preface to the score:

“Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees… an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo…. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.”

Ravel’s description doesn’t admit to any of the chaos or violence that enfolds in his piece. He denied that the work was a reflection on post-war Vienna. But others can’t help but hear the death of the waltz — and of Viennese imperial society — in Ravel’s work. Composer George Benjamin describes the piece: “Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the Waltz.”

This piece is scored for 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (one doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, a large complement of percussion, 2 harps, and strings.

Piano Concerto No. 2

Camille Saint-Saëns
BORN: October 9, 1835 | Paris, France
DIED: December 16, 1921 | Algiers, Algeria

Camille Saint-Saëns was a prolific composer who wrote in nearly all genres available to him: operas, symphonies, tone poems, concertos, chamber music, songs, choral music, and even one of the first film scores. He was an organist at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, conducted and performed as a pianist, and wrote poetry, plays, articles, and books. His second piano concerto was composed in less than three weeks, at the request of the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein.

Saint-Saëns and Rubinstein first met in 1858 and became friends. Their friendship lasted the rest of their lives and, during Rubinstein’s frequent visits to Paris, the two would often perform together. In the spring of 1868, Rubinstein was in Paris for a series of eight performances on which he was playing piano and Saint-Saëns was at the podium. As the series was coming to an end, Rubinstein proposed to Saint-Saëns that the two friends should swap places for a concert on which Rubinstein would make his Paris conducting debut with Saint-Saëns performing on piano. They looked for a venue and settled on a concert date just three weeks away. Saint-Saëns composed a new concerto for the occasion, completing the work in seventeen days.

The work is in three movements, like most concertos. But it does not carry the typical tempos of a concerto. The first movement is a slow, sacred-sounding Andante sostenuto, the second is a playful Allegro scherzando, and the third is a whirlwind Presto.

The first movement owes its character to Saint-Saëns’ long career as a church organist. It begins with an improvisatory sounding piano solo reminiscent of a Bach Fantasia. When the main theme emerges, it is a melody that Saint-Saëns borrowed from a discarded motet composed by his student Gabriel Fauré. (Pianist Alfred Cortot reported that Fauré “with absolute sincerity congratulated himself on the honor his master had done him by using his theme.”) Following a playful second movement that suggests the wittiness of the composer’s famous Carnival of the Animals, the third movement Presto is an extremely fast Tarantella that gives the soloist hardly any time for rest.

Unlike many of his Romantic contemporaries, Saint-Saëns believed in art for art’s sake. He wrote in his memoir: “He who does not get pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.”

This piece is scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, crash cymbal, and strings.

Symphonie Fantastique

Hector Berlioz
BORN: La Côte-Saint-André, France | December 11, 1803
DIED: Paris, France | March 8, 1869

In 1827, a young Hector Berlioz attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that would have a lasting effect on his life and work. He fell in love with Shakespeare, reading and quoting his works frequently for the rest of his life. The Bard inspired three major compositions — Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice et Bénédict, and the Roi Lear overture — and many more of his smaller works. But just as important as the love for Shakespeare that the performance sparked was Berlioz’s obsession with the play’s leading lady. Following the performance, Berlioz wrote of the actress Harriet Smithson: “The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius, was equalled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.”

Berlioz wrote letters to Smithson frequently over the next two years, though he never received a response. He referred to her as his Juliet, his Ophelia, and his Desdemona. In 1829, finally beaten down by unrequited love, Berlioz turned his obsession into composition with his Symphonie Fantastique, subtitled “An episode in the life of an artist in five parts.” This programmatic symphony tells the story of a gifted artist who, despairing over a woman who does not return his love, poisons himself with opium. A series of dream-like scenes follow: a ball, a countryside vignette, a harrowing march to the scaffold where the artist dreams he has killed his beloved and is facing execution, and a witch’s sabbath celebrating his death. Berlioz writes in his extensive program notes: “yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.” Berlioz musically evokes the haunting image of his beloved with an idée fixe: a musical theme that recurs in every movement and lends unity and structure to the piece.

The first movement opens with a slow, tender introduction. Berlioz writes:

“The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the confusion of passions, sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her.”

As the pace quickens to an allegro, violins and flutes in unison present the idée fixe.

The idée fixe morphs into a waltz theme in the second movement. It interrupts the quiet countryside scene of the third movement. And it notably returns at the end of the fourth movement’s march to the scaffold. Listen for the solo clarinet playing the beginning of the idée fixe as the artist’s last thought before the death blow sends his head bouncing to the ground with a plunk-plunk-plunk performed by pizzicato strings.

The final movement is “The Witch’s Sabbath.” According to Berlioz, it is

“a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath.”

This final mêlée of a movement brings together the idée fixe, distorted dance themes, and the funeral chant Dies Irae from the Latin Mass in a frighteningly triumphant conclusion.

In 1832, Smithson accepted Berlioz’s invitation to a performance of Symphonie Fantastique. Finally acknowledging his “dramatic genius,” she agreed to meet him. Berlioz succeeded in winning Harriet’s heart and the two were married in 1833. However, the marriage only lasted about six years as life with his “ideal person” seems to have spoiled in the light of the everyday.

This piece is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English Horn, 2 clarinets and E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets and 2 cornets, 3 trombones, 2 ophicleides (usually played on tuba), 2 harps, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, bells, and strings.

– Program notes by Sarah Ruddy, Ph.D.

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