Elgar Enigma Variations

Dallas Symphony Orchestra Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Orchestral Series

Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra commences its 2025 residency with an evening of pure inspiration conducted by Peter Oundjian. Pianist and Bravo! Vail's Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott performs Amy Beach's virtuosic Piano Concerto and Elgar's magnum opus, Enigma Variations, including the poignant Nimrod, closes the program.

LAWN SCREEN: Bravo! Vail is pleased to offer the lawn screen experience at this evening's concert.

Featured Artists

Peter Oundjian

conductor

Anne-Marie McDermott

piano

Peter Oundjian is a dynamic presence in the conducting world with an international career leading preeminent orchestras in many of the world's major musical centers, from New York and Seattle to Amsterdam and Berlin.

He is currently the music director of the Colorado Symphony, where he served previously as principal conductor. He is also music director of the Colorado Music Festival (CMF), where he has continued to program and conduct concerts that delight audiences with beloved masterpieces alongside music written by living composers. Over the course of his 14-year tenure as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which concluded in 2018, he reinvigorated the orchestra with acclaimed innovative programming, artistic collaborations, extensive audience growth, national and international tours and several outstanding recordings, including Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works, which garnered a GRAMMY nomination and a Juno Award. Under his leadership, the Symphony underwent a transformation that significantly strengthened its presence in the world.

From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, where he led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their music director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.

Oundjian was principal guest vonductor and artistic advisor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2008 and artistic director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York from 1997 to 2007. He was also the music director of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta from 1998-2002. Throughout his conducting career, Oundjian has appeared as guest conductor with the country’s leading orchestras, including The Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and San Francisco Symphonies, among others.

In addition to his conducting duties in Colorado, during the 2024-2025 season Oundjian leads subscription weeks with the Sarasota Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981 and has received honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

One of the most dazzling American pianists of her generation, Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is one of the most versatile, respected, and best-reviewed pianists of our time. McDermott continues her tenure as artistic director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, in Colorado, through 2026, which hosts world-renowned artists and orchestras from around the world. She is also the artistic director of the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, in Florida.  

Highlights of McDermott’s 2024-25 season include three performances of the Piano Concerto by the 20th-century American composer Amy Cheney Beach with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, with which she makes her subscription debut, and with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (MA); her debut in Galway, Ireland, performing music by Bach, Busoni, and Brahms at a Music for Galway recital; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Paducah Symphony Orchestra (KY); Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Des Moines Symphony, Palm Beach Symphony, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra USA (WA); performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, and on tour in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Ashland (OR), and Vienna (VA); a special chamber music program at the New World Symphony, in Miami Beach, that includes Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat major and Olivier Messiaen’s wartime masterwork Quartet for the End of Time; performances as a member of the SPA Trio—with soprano Susanna Phillips and violist Paul Neubauer—at the Rockefeller University (New York City), and at Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (Tucson); and a chamber music program at the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, in Stillwater (OK).  

McDermott’s 2023-24 season included performances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, both resulting in immediate re-engagements. She also performed Mozart with the New York Philharmonic at the McKnight Center in Stillwater. Recent international highlights include recitals in France at the famed Piano aux Jacobins, in Toulouse; performances with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra at the Cartagena International Music Festival; and an all-Haydn recital tour of China.   

The breadth of McDermott’s repertoire ranges from Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, also including works by today’s most influential composers. A recording artist, McDermott is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mexico City’s illustrious Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería, under conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. She has also recorded the complete piano sonatas of Prokofiev, solo works by Chopin, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine), and Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (also Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine). In 2013 she released an album of Mozart concertos with the Calder Quartet that was praised as “exceptional on every count” by Gramophone Magazine. She has recorded five Haydn piano sonatas and two Haydn concertos with the Odense Philharmonic, in Denmark, including two cadenzas written by the late American composer Charles Wuorinen.   

In recent years, McDermott participated in the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s Silver Jubilee all-Gershwin program and embarked on a cycle of Beethoven concertos at Santa Fe Pro Musica. She also premiered and recorded a new concerto by the Danish composer Poul Ruders with the Vancouver Symphony, alongside Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations, and returned to play Gershwin with the New York Philharmonic at Bravo! Vail. Other recent highlights include performing the Mozart Concerto, K. 595 with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Sir Donald Runnicles; the Bach D minor concerto with members of The Philadelphia Orchestra; and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with the New York City-based Le Train Bleu.  

McDermott continues to perform with many leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the symphonies of Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Colorado, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, San Diego, New Jersey, Columbus, and Baltimore. She has also toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.

McDermott, who studied at the Manhattan School of Music, is a winner of the Mortimer Levitt Career Development Award for Women, the Young Concert Artists auditions, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She lives in New York City with her husband Michael.

Peter Oundjian, conductor
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

AMY BEACH Piano Concerto
ELGAR Enigma Variations

- CANCELLED - Pre-Concert Talk Speaker: This evening's pre-concert talk is cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

AMY MARCY CHENEY BEACH (1867-1944)

Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, Op. 45
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Vivace (Perpetuum mobile)
Largo [attacca]
Allegro con scioltezza

Although nobody could have foreseen that Amy Marcy Cheney would become the first American woman to achieve international fame as a composer, there was no doubting her musical talent from the outset. At the age of one (!) she could sing 40 different tunes accurately, always in the same key. Her public debut as a pianist (at seven) included her own music as well as selections by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin. In 1885, she married the surgeon (and amateur singer and poetaster) Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a socially prominent widower 25 years her senior, after which she donated her concert fees to charity. She shifted her emphasis from performing to composition, and by the time she died, in 1944, she had earned acclaim as one of America’s leading composers, though she doubtless would have preferred that the general public know her for large-scale pieces, such as her Gaelic Symphony and her Piano Concerto, rather than just her once-ubiquitous parlor songs “Ah, Love, But a Day” and “The Year’s at the Spring.”

Her Piano Concerto, a big-boned composition in the Romantic tradition, seems to incorporate a veiled narrative, each movement alluding to personally significant songs she had composed years earlier. The song “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” recycled as the second theme of the first movement, portrayed a young woman’s coffin being lowered into the grave as her father watches—perhaps, speculated Beach biographer Adrienne Fried Block, symbolizing Beach’s older husband “killing” her concert career, which may overreach somewhat. (Henry had this song in his vocal repertoire.) The second movement references “Empress of Night,” a setting of a poem by Henry and carrying a dedication to Amy’s mother; the piano’s effervescent figurations trace back to the piano accompaniment in the song. Another of Henry’s poems served as the text for “Twilight”; the opening and closing portions of her song setting echo through the third and fourth movements respectively, the finale being marked Allegro con scioltezza (Allegro with agility).

The composer served as soloist in the work’s premiere, with the Boston Symphony in April 1900—one of her sporadic public appearances until after her husband’s death in 1910. The critics were harsh, complaining that the orchestra texture was too thick and allowing touches of misogyny to creep into their columns. Reception turned more positive with repeated performances. When Beach introduced it in Berlin, in 1913, it earned a far more favorable review: “This work, presented by the resourceful composer with admirable pianistic finish and verve, is not only a piano Concerto, but a pianist’s Concerto, that is extremely grateful to the executive artist without losing its balance and descending to the level of a mere show-piece of virtuosity.”

EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934)

Variations on an Original Theme, Enigma, Op. 36
Theme
I. (C.A.E.)
II. (H.D.S-P)
III. (R.B.T.)
IV. (W.M.B.)
V. (R.P.A.)
VI. (Ysobel)
VII. (Troyte)
VIII. (W.N.)
IX. (Nimrod)
X. (Dorabella)—Intermezzo
XI. (G.R.S.)
XII. (B.G.N.)
XIII. (* * *)—Romanza
XIV. (E.D.U.)—Finale
(played without pause)

Edward Elgar was just claiming his position as England’s leading composer when, in 1899, he unveiled his Variations on an Original Theme (Op. 36), popularly known as the Enigma Variations. The program note explained that he had crafted each of the variations to describe some friend or acquaintance, but that he would not reveal their identities. The connection of music to subject was suggested by initials attached to each section, but it was understood that these might not always be simplistic renderings of the initials of the names of the “portraits” but rather more complicated codes (perhaps alluding to a nickname, for example). And then the composer suggested that something deeper might be going on: “The enigma I will not explain—its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played—so the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas—e.g. Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse and Les Sept princesses—the chief character is never on the stage.” This made everyone terribly curious, of course, and a flurry of hypothesizing ensued, some of it downright batty. For his part, Elgar fanned the flames of speculation by dropping elusive comments such as “the theme is so well known that it is extraordinary that no one has spotted it,” as he remarked to Arthur Toye Griffith (portrayed in Variation VII) or, to Dora Penny (a.k.a. Mrs. Richard Powell, the “Dorabella” of Variation X) that he was flabbergasted that “you, of all people,” had not solved the puzzle. At the same time, he resolutely refused to reveal the solution, and whatever he did say tended to toss what may be red herrings into waters that were already muddy. Part of Elgar’s enigma was solved quickly: the identities of the subjects portrayed leave not much room for doubt, ranging through a circle of acquaintances. Many believe that the larger enigma of these variations, the “dark saying” to which Elgar alluded, may be mere subterfuge—that the enigma cannot be guessed with certainty because no enigma exists.

The most famous of Elgar’s variations is the ninth, a five-minute Adagio titled Nimrod. Nimrod was an Old Testament character whose name meant “Mighty Hunter Before God.” Elgar extended the hunter allusion to identify Augustus Jaeger, his closest musical confidant and an editor at the publishing firm that published his works. Jaeger is the German word for “hunter.” Here the theme builds from deepest contemplation to overflowing emotion, yielding a movement whose gravity has made it a piece of choice for performance at solemn occasions.