Verizon Hall
Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor
Carol Jantsch Tuba
Marsalis Tuba Concerto (world premiere—Philadelphia Orchestra co-commission)
Brahms Symphony No. 1
Program Notes
Wynton Marsalis’s newly minted Tuba Concerto is given its world premiere on
the Philadelphia Orchestra stage. Principal Tuba Carol Jantsch will be the first to perform this brilliant pairing of classical and jazz in Marsalis’s inimitable style. More than a century before, Johannes Brahms spent 23 years struggling with the pressure to write a symphony.
Brahms wrote his first symphony under the weight of tremendous expectations, as the classical world puzzled over the future of instrumental music after Beethoven’s passing. Brahms used his natural gifts for lyrical melody and rich harmonizations to compose an homage to the master with his first symphonic masterpiece, sometimes referred to as “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
When his long-awaited Symphony No. 1 finally premiered in 1876, a friend and critic noted, “Seldom, if ever, has the entire musical world awaited a composer’s first symphony with such tense anticipation … [but audiences] will immediately recognize it as one of the most distinctive and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.”