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Photo Credit: Maxim Abrossimow

PAVILION SOLD OUT - Limited Lawn

Scheherazade with New York Philharmonic

New York Philharmonic Yulianna Avdeeva, piano
Orchestral Series
Sunday, July 20, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
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Pavilion SOLD OUT, please email Ticketing@BravoVail.org to be added to the waitlist.

The New York Philharmonic and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali perform Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a captivating tale of adventure and intrigue. Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva brings virtuosic flair to Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Schubert’s playful Marches Militaires provides a delightful opening to the evening, led by Special Guest Conductor Carole Christie Fleming.

Featured Artists

Santtu-Matias Rouvali

conductor

Yulianna Avdeeva

piano

Program Highlights

Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
Carole Fleming, special guest conductor
Yulianna Avdeeva, piano

SCHUBERT Marches Militaires
TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No. 1
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Program Notes

Selections from Marche militaire No. 1 in D major, D. 733 (1818?)

(4 minutes)

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828), arranged by Leopold Damrosch

Selections from Marche militaire No. 1 in D major, D. 733

Franz Schubert’s principal musical milieu was domestic, from the familial string-quartet sessions of his youth to the circle of devoted friends—poets, artists, musicians, and hangers-on—who witnessed the premieres of the vast majority of his compositions at musical parties called Schubertiades. At-home gatherings were often enlivened by dances Schubert composed for piano solo or four-hands—waltzes, Deutscher (“German dances”), ländler, galops, ecossaises, polonaises … and marches. He composed seven installments of marches for piano four-hands, three of them as sets—the Marches héroiques, Marches caractéristiques, and Marches militaires. The origin of his three Marches militaires is uncertain, not helped by the fact that his manuscript apparently does not survive. The pieces may date from 1818 or perhaps from 1823; in any case, they were not published until 1826. If the 1818 date is correct, he might have written them at the Hungarian estate of Count Johann Karl Esterházy of Galanta, who hired Schubert to spend the summer as piano and singing tutor for his two daughters. If they were written later, they probably served as Schubertiade entertainment. The first of the three marches is by far the most famous. The orchestral arrangement performed here was made by Leopold Damrosch (1832-85), a German born physician-turned-conductor who immigrated to the United States in 1871. He founded the Oratorio Society of New York and served as conductor of the New York Philharmonic for a year before establishing his own orchestra, the New York Symphony Society, which, four decades after his passing, would merge with the Philharmonic.

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 (1874, rev. 1889)

(36 minutes)

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23
     Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso— Allegro con spirito
     Andantino semplice—Prestissimo— Tempo I
     Allegro con fuoco

The ink was hardly dry on the manuscript of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 when, on Christmas Eve of 1874, he showed it to his colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, director of the Moscow Conservatory. Some three years later the composer recounted the experience in a letter. “I played the first movement. Not a word, not an observation. If you only knew how uncomfortably foolish one feels when one places before a friend a dish one has prepared with one’s own hands, and he eats thereof and—is silent. At least say something: if you like, find fault in a friendly way, but, for heaven’s sake, speak—say something, no matter what. But Rubinstein said nothing; he was preparing his thunder ….” This changed soon enough. “At first,” Tchaikovsky continued, “he spoke quietly, but by degrees his passion rose, and finally he resembled Zeus hurling thunderbolts. It appeared that my concerto was worthless and absolutely unplayable, that the passages were manufactured and withal so clumsy as to be beyond correction, that the composition itself was bad, trivial, and commonplace, that I had stolen this point from somebody and that point from somebody else, that only two or three pages had any value whatsoever, and all the rest should be either destroyed or entirely remodeled ….”

Tchaikovsky decided to have his concerto published just as it stood (although he did revise it a few years later). He dedicated it to the German pianist-and-conductor Hans von Bülow, who resolved to unveil it during his upcoming American tour. That explains why this emblem of “the Russian style” received its premiere, on October 25, 1875, at the Music Hall in Boston, with Bülow as soloist—a German pianist playing on an American Chickering grand—and with Boston’s own Benjamin Johnson Lang conducting an orchestra of Massachusetts freelancers. The piece created a sensation as Bülow repeated it throughout his tour, and its popularity has not faded since.

INTERMISSION

Scheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Op. 35 (1888)

(46 minutes)

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)

Scheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Op. 35
     Largo e maestoso—Allegro non troppo
     Lento—Andantino
     Andantino quasi allegretto
     Allegro molto
Frank Huang, violin

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov based the idea of Scheherazade on tales in the Arabian Nights. He vacillated about how much discernable plot he wanted to inject in it. The prose introduction he attached to his score after it was complete clarifies that the suite has clear literary implications but does not in itself suggest the specific events that are depicted in tones: “The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the duplicity and infidelity of all women, vowed to slay each of his wives after the first night. The Sultana Scheherazade, however, saved her life by the expedient of recounting to the Sultan a succession of tales over a period of one thousand one nights. Overcome by curiosity, the monarch postponed the execution of his wife from day to day, and ended by renouncing his sanguinary resolution altogether.”

Rimsky-Korsakov detailed the work’s evolution in his memoirs. “My aversion for seeking too definite a program in my composition led me subsequently … to do away with even those hints of [a narrative] which had lain in the headings of each movement, like ‘The Sea,’ ‘Sinbad’s Ship,’ ‘The Kalendar’s Narrative,’ and so forth.” He continued: “In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each. All I had desired was that the hearer … should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairytale wonders and … composed on the basis of themes common to all the four movements. … The unifying thread consisted of the brief introductions to the first, second, and fourth movements and the intermezzo in movement three, written for violin solo and delineating Scheherazade herself as she tells her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan.”

Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

530 S Frontage Rd E Vail, CO 81657 Venue information