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Photo Credit: Ian Ehm

Photo Credit: Marco Borggreve

Stravinsky Violin Concerto

New York Philharmonic Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Orchestral Series
Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater
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Czech Conductor Jakub Hrůša opens the New York Philharmonic's 22nd Bravo! Vail season with a striking program: beginning with a new work from American composer Jessie Montgomery followed by Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in the hands of international sensation, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and concluding with Brahms' stunning First Symphony.

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

Featured Artists

Jakub Hrůša

conductor

Patricia Kopatchinskaja

violin

Program Highlights

Jakub Hrůša, conductor
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin

JESSIE MONTGOMERY Co-Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as part of Project 19, with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, and The Sphinx Organization.
STRAVINSKY Violin Concerto
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

Pre-Concert Talk Speaker: Johanna Frymoyer (Notre Dame) 
5:10 PM | Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater Lobby

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Program Notes

CHEMILUMINESCENCE (2025)

(12 minutes)

JESSIE MONTGOMERY (b.1981)

CHEMILUMINESCENCE
(Vail Premiere, Co-commission by Bravo! Vail, the New York Philharmonic, and the Sphinx Organization)

SYMPHONIC COMMISSIONING PROJECT

Music is my connection to the world,” wrote Jessie Montgomery. “It guides me to understand my place in relation to others and challenges me to make clear the things I do not understand.” A graduate of New York University and The Juilliard School, she is pursuing the Ph.D. in composition at Princeton University. Since 1999 she has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which provides opportunities for musicians from Black and other minority backgrounds. She has appeared often as a violinist with the Silkroad Ensemble and Sphinx Virtuosi and was a member of PUBLIQuartet and the Catalyst Quartet. She recently completed a three-year term as composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony. Named Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, she serves on the composition and music technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

She offers this comment about her new work: “‘Chemiluminescence’ is the scientific term to describe any chemical reaction that produces light from a non-light source, such as a firefly rubbing its wings to produce a glow, or bioluminescence along ocean’s edge, or the light produced from a cracked glow stick. The light produced can present varied qualities as infrared, visible, or ultraviolet. As a composer, interpreting light sources and its resulting reflections and hues is an endless field of potential sound exploration. I used my impressions on this idea to create harmonies, colors, and blends I feel are unique to the string orchestra with its ability to bend and shift timbres in an instant. The piece is in three distinct sections, each of which interpret light, agitation, reaction, and frenetic interplay in its orchestration. This piece represents my continued interest in finding corollary between music and the natural world.”

Violin Concerto in D (1931)

(22 minutes)

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)

Violin Concerto in D
     I. Toccata (Tempo ????=120)
     II. Aria I (Tempo ????=116)
     III. Aria II (Tempo ♪=48)
     IV. Capriccio (Tempo ♪=120)

In 1930, Igor Stravinsky’s publisher broached the idea of his writing a violin concerto and suggested that the young American violinist Samuel Dushkin would make an ideal interpreter. “I hesitated because I am not a violinist,” Stravinsky later recalled in his Autobiography, “and I was afraid that my slight knowledge of that instrument would not be sufficient to enable me to solve the many problems which would necessarily arise in the course of a major work especially composed for it.” Stravinsky’s colleague Paul Hindemith, who was a professional violist as well as a composer, assured him that lack of first-hand experience with the violin would help Stravinsky “avoid a routine technique and would give rise to ideas which would not be suggested by the familiar movement of the fingers.” “Whenever he accepted one of my suggestions,” Dushkin reported, “even a simple change such as extending the range of the violin by stretching the phrase to the octave below and the octave above, Stravinsky would insist on altering the very foundations correspondingly. He behaved like an architect who if asked to change a room on the third floor had to go down to the foundations to keep the proportions of his whole structure.”

In this work we find Stravinsky in his neo-Classical—or neo-Baroque— mode, right down to the fact that the principal theme of the first movement is little more than a curlicued elaboration of a single note. Another neo-Baroque element in the piece is its ceaseless, ebullient rhythmic pulse. That is surely one reason why George Balanchine employed it for the ballet he titled Balustrade, which he presented with De Basil’s Original Ballet Russe in New York in 1941. Stravinsky considered that setting to be one of the most successful of all ballet productions using his music.

INTERMISSION

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1862-77)

(45 minutes)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 
     Un poco sostenuto—Allegro
     Andante sostenuto
     Un poco allegretto e grazioso
     Adagio—Più andante—Allegro non troppo, ma con brio

“I shall never write a symphony!” Brahms declared in 1872 to the conductor Hermann Levi. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like to hear such a giant marching behind you.” The giant was Beethoven, whose music set such a high standard that the younger composer found it easy to discount his own creations as negligible in comparison.

Nonetheless, his self-criticism pushed him to forge ahead even when his eventual path seemed obscure. It was a slow process; he struggled with his First Symphony on and off for 15 years. He drafted the first movement in 1862 and shared it with his friend Clara Schumann. She copied out the opening and sent it to their violinist-friend Joseph Joachim with this comment: “That is rather strong, for sure, but I have grown used to it. The movement is full of wonderful beauties, and the themes are treated with a mastery that is becoming more and more characteristic of him.” She then jotted a musical example— essentially the spot where the main section of the first movement begins (Allegro) following the slower introduction. Calling the opening “rather strong” is an understatement. That first movement’s introduction is one of the most astonishing preludes in the entire symphonic literature, with throbbing timpani, contrabassoon, and double basses underpinning the orchestra’s taut phrases—a texture that seizes the listener’s attention and remains engraved in the memory.

Brahms’s First is a big, brawny symphony. Even the warmth of the second movement and the geniality of the third are interrupted by passages of anxiety, and the outer movements are designed to impress rather than to charm. The symphony’s “purpose” is essentially articulated in those outer movements; against these, the second and third movements stand as a two part intermezzo, throwing the weighty proceedings that surround them into higher relief.

Presto Club - 2025 Activity Booklet

Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

530 S Frontage Rd E Vail, CO 81657 Venue information